Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 06:15:34 +0100 From: Martin Welk <mw@theatre.sax.de> To: Jonathon McKitrick <jcm@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: speed increases ? Message-ID: <19991216061534.D87366@theatre.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.9912152354100.96344-100000@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>; from jcm@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org on Wed, Dec 15, 1999 at 11:56:07PM %2B0000 References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.9912152354100.96344-100000@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>
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On Wed, Dec 15, 1999 at 11:56:07PM +0000, Jonathon McKitrick wrote:
> Well, i installed softupdates, and added flags to wdc0, and i'm still
> here! And i think everything runs faster... who knows...
As I've written about ten minutes ago, run /sbin/mount and look at its
output, it tells you if softupdates are in use.
> Does it make sense to leave softupdates turned off for the root partition,
> to protect it's integrity a little more? Or will i lose a lot of the
> benefits since much of the I/O is to var and tmp?
There was the discussion about one risk with softupdates a while ago: when
a disk runs out of space and you're deleting files and during that putting
more on it, the space will get free but the meta data isn't written fast
enough and there could some situation happen where the file system looks
full although it isn't really - and the result was a possible kernel panic
with reboot and data loss.
Now for the positive part: I'm using softupdates on several machines at work
(about 8-10 machines) and at home and never experienced any difficulties, any
kernel panic or any data loss, although there's always some even more heavy
disk activity like making the world.
As I usually use small root file systems (40-50 mbytes), I never activate
softupdates for them because most of the data on it will normally only be
read and read again and again, but it's almost static (configuration at
/etc, binaries in /bin and /sbin and such things), so there will be no
real performance gain with softupdates. For security reasons, I decided
to leave them from root - with that problem I described above and such
little root file systems, this could happen earlier than on a /var or
/tmp or something like that where there is pretty much spare space :-)
Regards,
Martin
--
/| /| | /| / ,,You know, there's a lot of opportunities,
/ |/ | artin |/ |/ elk if you're knowing to take them,
you know, there's a lot of opportunities,
Freiberg/Saxony, Germany if there aren't you can make them,
mw@sax.de / mw@theatre.sax.de make or break them!'' (Tennant/Lowe)
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