Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 23:53:20 -0400 From: Bill Moran <wmoran@iowna.com> To: Nathan Mace <nmace85@yahoo.com>, freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: soft updates Message-ID: <01091623532001.12342@proxy.the-i-pa.com> In-Reply-To: <20010916205323.7039d728.nmace85@yahoo.com> References: <20010916205323.7039d728.nmace85@yahoo.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sunday 16 September 2001 20:53, Nathan Mace wrote: > i'm looking at the freebsd handbook right now, trying to decide if i should > use soft-updates on my box. i can't afford to lose any data, that is > written in stone. > > it says: "First, Soft Updates guarantees filesystem consistency in the case > of a crash..." is this true? it also lists two "problems" that might > occur using it. one would be that it 'runs' out of space if my drive is > close to being full. thats not an issue, niether is the 2nd problem > > basically what i'm asking is is it stable? and how much of a performance > gain am i gonna see? thanks I've been running softupdates on a number of production machines for over a year now - many of them in concert with vinum. I'll have to say that the stability is there. Some of these machines are in sketchy environments, where power outages are far too common, as well as itchy employees that hit the power switch on the server at the first sign of trouble. An unexpected shutdown has never caused a softupdates filesystem to fail to fsck and remount. In the worst case I've seen, I had to run fsck manually to get things going again, but it worked. In case you aren't aware, I've never seen nor heard of softupdates causing data corruption under normal conditions - only with unclean shutdowns, and in that case, any filesystem is liable to get corrupted. I can't vouch personally for the performance section, as I've never really tested it. There are many resources on the internet, however. The only drawback to softupdates that I know of, is it's actually _slower_ on machines with extremely low RAM. (i.e. there is so little RAM that the system regularly needs to swap during normal operation) I seriously doubt that this is a problem right now, with RAM prices what they are. -- Bill Moran Potential Technology technical services (412) 793-4257 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?01091623532001.12342>