On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 10:54:34AM -0700, Hans Reiser wrote:
> >Using 2.6.16.11 with reiser4 for 2.6.16-2, things are still very bad.
> We are trying to get a large patch out the door.If it does not fix
> it, please remind me of this, and we will write some (nontrivial) code
> that I suspect is needed. Does this freezing happen about every 600
> seconds?
>
Not that I'm aware of; the conditions at which "it" (1) happens do feel
random, but more likely when doing many things in paral·lel, and is easily
triggered by just changing something then scrolling up and down or writing
a file with the VIM editor, as I originally reported; I strongly believe
it's fsync related. VIM makes a "work copy" of the file being edited,
and then accesses it with mmap and probably fsyncs changes often, so
that the least minimum is lost in the event of a power failure or, say, a
system crash.
I don't use that computer ([EMAIL PROTECTED], 768mb) as my desktop anymore (my
brother does) so it's back with 2.6.12.6 so that it doesn't give him problems.
My current desktop (athlon-xp 1600+ @1400MHz, 512mb) was donated by a friend
and has a small HD I had on a drawer. It uses XFS; will move it to reiser4 the
moment I confirm this problem fixed on the other one and buy a bigger disk.
The interesting part is that I rely on NFS to access my old home, gentoo's
portage tree and some other stuff in there, mounted in sync mode, and "it" (1)
seems to trigger like _each_ time I, for example, download a file with wget
into there, slowing the download down to no more than 20KB/s (I can get
400KB/s or so from internet). Supposedly the "sync" mount option is a KEY
there, because it supposedly causes each write not to report done until it's
actually done, which means continous fsyncings in the nfs server side.
(1) "it": HD led stays on, gkrellm reports continous writing to disk at
about half megabyte/sec, I/O is slowed down dramatically (opening a
Maildir with Mutt takes ages), the condition lasts anywhere from a few
seconds to a whole minute.
--
- Do you study theories? - Oh yes! Theories are fun. - How do you use them? -
When I must act, theories are too slow. To act, I must know.
