From owner-freebsd-questions  Tue Mar  5  9:53:54 2002
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From: Brian T.Schellenberger <bts@babbleon.org>
To: Burhan Nazir <burhan@blueyonder.co.uk>,
	Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>
Subject: Re: Softupdates on root in 4.5-RELEASE
Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 10:36:06 -0500
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On Tuesday 05 March 2002 10:24 am, Burhan Nazir wrote:
> Softupdates will not write any data immediatly to the disk.  I believe
> it is about 30 seconds b4 any data actually gets wriiten.  This enhances
> disk write speed for certain types of operations.  However, there is a
> small risk of data loss/coruption if the machine looses power b4 any data
> was written.  For that reason, ppl believe that it is not a good idea to
> have softupdates on the system critical root partition

I think it's more a matter of avoiding it on partitions that are likely to be 
rather full and fairly small, since the delay in processing deletes means 
that you effectively lose a certain amount of disk space due to processing 
time.

Thus, if you 

rm /bit/honking/directory/*
operation-that-write-to-disk

you can easily run out of disk space as the second operation starts writing 
long before the first operation actually returns space to the system.

I personally make the root partition larger and enable soft-updates but 
disable write-caching.  This seems much safer than the system default way of 
doing things to me, but with nearly equal performance.

>
> Brett Glass wrote:
> >Just noticed that the default, in 4.5-RELEASE, is to install
> >softupdates on all partitions EXCEPT root. Is this an oversight,
> >or is there a reason why this is the default setting?


> >
> >--Brett Glass
> >
> >To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
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-- 
Brian T. Schellenberger . . . . . . .   bts@wnt.sas.com (work)
Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . .   bts@babbleon.org (personal)
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