On Thu, 2008-02-28 at 07:15 +0000, Jamie Lokier wrote: > Jerome Haltom wrote: > > The problem is that during the rsync process the user's machine is > > barely usable. The reason is because rsync reads these 2GB files... many > > GBs of them. This causes the user's machine to repeatidly trash the page > > cache. This really is Linux's fault. It should realize the relative > > priority of the two apps and prevent rsync from trashing the cache. But > > it doesn't. > > > > Allowing rsync to specific O_DIRECT would circumvent the page cache > > completely. Preventing the cache from being trashed. > > On Linux, fadvise(POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED) trailing behind the read/write > position is more appropriate for this, I suspect.
Tobias Oetiker wrote a patch to rsync that uses fadvise to minimize the effect on the page cache: http://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync/2007-May/017763.html The distributed patch "drop-cache.diff" is an older version of this patch. Wayne, would you care to update it? Matt -- To unsubscribe or change options: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
