From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Apr 14 16:24:17 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id QAA21488 for hackers-outgoing; Sun, 14 Apr 1996 16:24:17 -0700 (PDT) Received: from dyson.iquest.net (dyson.iquest.net [198.70.144.127]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id QAA21481 for ; Sun, 14 Apr 1996 16:24:13 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from root@localhost) by dyson.iquest.net (8.7.5/8.6.9) id SAA00427; Sun, 14 Apr 1996 18:22:35 -0500 (EST) From: "John S. Dyson" Message-Id: <199604142322.SAA00427@dyson.iquest.net> Subject: Re: Unices are created equal, but ... To: andreas@knobel.gun.de (Andreas Klemm) Date: Sun, 14 Apr 1996 18:22:20 -0500 (EST) Cc: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, groudier@iplus.fr, hackers@FreeBSD.org, linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu In-Reply-To: from "Andreas Klemm" at Apr 14, 96 11:12:38 pm Reply-To: dyson@FreeBSD.org X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24 ME8] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > Whole Linux seems to be a memory file system ;-) They are caching > like hell. Only benchmarks like bonnie on files of about 3xRAMSIZE > address the fact that we want to bench the disk and not the RAM. > Gerard compares chicken with eggs. This Byte Bench is really > questionable. > The most evil things about aggressively write cache are the memory starvation and sync issues. On FreeBSD we purposely decided to limit the amount of dirty cached file data. It can become a real problem with big memory systems!!! The AT&T GIS/NCR/Tandem boxes really acted badly when users would tune the system to allow too much memory to be dirty filesystem cache buffers. I could be convinced that 1/4 of memory for dirty buffers is okay, and in some cases even more could be considered. But those cases where a system could gain significantly from huge write caches are few and far between. I guess if managed VERY WELL, a large (>1/2 mem) write cache would be good -- I just haven't seen that yet. John dyson@freebsd.org