From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed May 23 22:48:12 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from silby.com (cb34181-a.mdsn1.wi.home.com [24.14.173.39]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 53F8637B634 for ; Wed, 23 May 2001 22:48:04 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from silby@silby.com) Received: (qmail 55540 invoked by uid 1000); 24 May 2001 05:48:02 -0000 Received: from localhost (sendmail-bs@127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 24 May 2001 05:48:02 -0000 Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 00:48:02 -0500 (CDT) From: Mike Silbersack To: Ed Hudson Cc: , Soren Schmidt Subject: Re: general speed differences between 4.1.1-RELEASE and 4.3-RELEASE In-Reply-To: <3B0C9DBB.35724C09@spnet.com> Message-ID: <20010524004057.V55532-100000@achilles.silby.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wed, 23 May 2001, Ed Hudson wrote: > > howdy. > > maybe this has been discussed in 'hackers' or elsewhere, > before - i can't find a reference via the search interface. > > i'm a long time freebsd user, and i've been struck by how much my > systems (3 of them) have slowed down in its disk performance with > 4.3-RELEASE, relative to 4.2-RELEASE and 4.1.1-RELEASE. Write caching is now off by default. man ata to see how to turn it back on. Seeing messages like this is becoming quite common on the lists since the change was made. On the other hand, I don't recall seeing any message about disks being trashed when caching was enabled by default. Given that the option is tunable, perhaps it would be best to leave it enabled by default. Those concerned about power failures would still be able to disable it if they wish. With the extreme levels of annoying shown by those since the change, I have the bad feeling that FreeBSD will get a reputation as being slower than other OSes unless the default is returned to its previous state. Mike "Silby" Silbersack To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message