On Thu, 3 Feb 2000 11:47:43 -0700 , [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
> AFAIK, the benefits of softupdates over fully asyncronous
> operation has not been well proven. softupdates assure that the
> metadata on the disk is always in a consistant state. It says
> nothing about the data.
Neither does vanilla FFS (which is apparently Dan's
benchmark for reliability). That's why the fsync()
call was invented. FFS/softupdates honors fsync
calls, FFS/async does not. That's the difference.
The one issue I had forgotten about was the
rename()/link() issue. I'll be looking more into
that when I have the time (the softupdates code
is really quite complex).
> Getting back on topic, I use an ext2 async filesystem for qmail.
> The tradeoff of performance for reliability is not worth it in my
> opinion. The chances of my machines going down at the exact
> moment that email could be lost seems pretty small. For high
> volume sites with reliability requirements a journalling
> filesystem like ext3 should probably be used.
FFS gives fairly decent performance, even without
async.
--
Chris Mikkelson | Einstein himself said that God doesn't roll dice. But
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | he was wrong. And in fact, anyone who has played role-
| playing games knows that God probably had to roll quite
| a few dice to come up with a character like Einstein.
| -- Larry Wall
