From owner-freebsd-current Tue May 1 18:45:18 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from areilly.bpc-users.org (CPE-144-132-234-126.nsw.bigpond.net.au [144.132.234.126]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id E5C3637B423 for ; Tue, 1 May 2001 18:45:15 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from areilly@bigpond.net.au) Received: (qmail 1940 invoked by uid 1000); 2 May 2001 01:45:16 -0000 From: "Andrew Reilly" Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 11:45:16 +1000 To: Rik van Riel Cc: Bruce Evans , Cejka Rudolf , freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Experiences with new dir allocation on FFS? Message-ID: <20010502114516.C1059@gurney.reilly.home> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: ; from riel@conectiva.com.br on Sun, Apr 29, 2001 at 12:50:08AM -0300 Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sun, Apr 29, 2001 at 12:50:08AM -0300, Rik van Riel wrote: > For the people wanting to turn on write caching ... it WILL break > the write ordering needed by softupdates and journaling filesystems, > so don't do it unless you know what you're doing. > > I guess it would be better to do this kind of write caching at the > kernel level, because the OS has a much better idea of when to write > which data to platter than a harddisk can ever have. However, on ATA without tagged queuing, turning off write caching (on my own UDMA33 system) reduces write performance by a factor of two. From 12MB/s to 6MB/s on my system. That is almost certainly because (a) ATA limits individual transfers to 64k, and (b) you can't get the next 64k into the drive before you miss the opportunity to stream the data into the next sector, so you lose a revolution _every_ write. I think I'll rely on the power system and my nightly backups, and leave .wc=1, thanks. Sure, on my next system I'll either go back to SCSI or find some ATA tagged queuing drives, but at the moment, I have to use what I've got... -- Andrew To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message