From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Feb 15 15:47:54 1999 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id PAA24673 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Mon, 15 Feb 1999 15:47:54 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from caladan.tdx.co.uk (caladan.tdx.co.uk [195.188.177.4]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA24270 for ; Mon, 15 Feb 1999 15:45:23 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from kpielorz@tdx.co.uk) Received: from tdx.co.uk (lorca-tx.tdx.co.uk [195.188.177.242]) by caladan.tdx.co.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id XAA05040; Mon, 15 Feb 1999 23:44:50 GMT Message-ID: <36C8B16F.F3C5B7EE@tdx.co.uk> Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1999 23:44:47 +0000 From: Karl Pielorz Organization: TDX - The Digital eXchange X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (WinNT; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Kent Stewart CC: Thomas van Gulick , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD performance References: <19990215144708.A34665@utumno.student.utwente.nl> <36C83508.B7F45FC8@tdx.co.uk> <36C88049.A423185A@3-cities.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Kent Stewart wrote: > The argument of sync versus async on the writes only matter if you have a > flaky system or are doing online database transactions. Hmmm... Or if your dealing with directories with lots of files, lots of other directories, writes to lots of files in those directories - or you have reason to use the 'rm -rf *' liberally :-) > The delay for the > writes are only a couple of seconds. That is why you used to "sync" disks at > shutdown. Sorry, I don't quite follow this... Although I'm not too up on FreeBSD's sync mounts, I know that softupdates 'delays' can run to around 30 seconds or so, I'm fairly sure 'sync' mounts delays under FreeBSD are similar (i.e. more than a couple of seconds delay, especially under load where it has to play 'catchup'?) - and you _still_ need to 'sync' before you shutdown these days :-) I think in order of preference I would take softupdates, async and then sync... The original complaint was of general FreeBSD 'sluggishness' - though I suspect some of this might be the filesystem differences between 'in vogue' versions of Linux and stock 2.2.X relelases of FreeBSD - going on that's what I first noticed when I made the switch (apart from an increase in throughput, a decrease in load average and a hell of a lot more stability when under pressure). I can't see it making all the difference in this case (yet)... I guess we'll have to wait for the original poster to post again... In the meantime this thread is getting a little out-of-step for -questions, though I'm open to suggestions on where to take it -Kp To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message