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Date:      Tue, 28 May 96 23:04:11 CDT
From:      Joe Greco <jgreco@solaria.sol.net>
To:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Breaking ffs - speed enhancement?
Message-ID:  <199605290404.XAA25324@solaria.sol.net>

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Well, I finally went and did it.  :-)

I added a flag to mount to tell FFS not to worry about the datestamps on
inodes.

Intended goal: on a busy news server with a hundred articles per second
going out the door, I felt that it might not be reasonable to try to write
the st_atime changes back out to the disk.  Basically, no one gives a rip,
and that's a lotta writes that I don't have time or disk bandwidth to do.

I haven't done any benchmarks.  However, I did see the machine peak at 9.7
articles per second, beating the previous 7.6, which might have been due to
this change, or maybe not.

Am I just totally whacked out, or is this perhaps a reasonable thing to do,
given that I'd really rather not have to absorb the extra write activity on
the filesystems...  does anybody else perceive any value along these lines
of thought?

(I don't pretend to think my patches are complete or correct, btw, I just
wanted to see how badly I could mess things up.  In particular due to the
way I did things, file dates don't get set on a create, either, so all my
files are dated 1969.  The "ideal" solution might set the date correctly on
a create, but not touch it on a modify or a read).

... Joe

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Greco - Systems Administrator			      jgreco@ns.sol.net
Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI			   414/342-4847



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