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Date:      Tue, 22 Aug 1995 16:23:11 +1000
From:      Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
To:        hsu@cs.hut.fi, terry@cs.weber.edu
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freefall.FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Making a FreeBSD NFS server
Message-ID:  <199508220623.QAA26175@godzilla.zeta.org.au>

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>   Correct my previous post to say "don't enable async writes, ever, it's
>   not worth it (unless you have a UPS on your server).

>It still could be fixed (-o async does not seem to do anything now).  It is

-o async works better in -current.  The fix was very small.

>somewhat annoying to, say, copy a news file system to another disk.  I
>couldn't care less if I would have to newfs the whole target in case of
>panic or power hick-up during the copy.

File creation and removal are still quite slow due to synchronous writes
for directories.  For creating and removing 1000 files I saw the following
times:

Machine   System          Load Disk   fs         op     time
--------- --------------- ---- ------ ---------- ------ -----------------------
486DX2/66 Linux-1.2.13    1     slow  ext2fs     creat   6.98r 0.07u 5.98s
"         FreeBSD-2.2-cur 0     5MB/s ufs(async) "      12.31r 0.03u 3.09s
"         FreeBSD-2.2-cur 0     "     ufs        "      27.39r 0.08u 3.26s
486DX/33  FreeBSD-2.2-cur 0     1MB/s ufs(async) "      22.55r 0.12u 6.14s
"         FreeBSD-2.2-cur 0     "     ufs        "      58.22r 0.10u 6.73s
486DX2/66 Linux-1.2.13    1     slow  ext2fs     unlink  0.99r 0.07u 0.69s
"         FreeBSD-2.2-cur 0     5MB/s ufs(async) "       8.72r 0.06u 0.80s
"         FreeBSD-2.2-cur 0     "     ufs        "      24.34r 0.02u 0.92s
486DX/33  FreeBSD-2.2-cur 0     1MB/s ufs(async) "      17.34r 0.03u 1.41s
"         FreeBSD-2.2-cur 0     "     ufs        "      42.34r 0.12u 1.69s

Summary: creat() seems to be about twice as fast for ufs as for ext2fs
(I think this is because ext2fs is slow for large directories).  However,
not-quite-async writes make it twice as slow, and sync writes make it
4 times as slow.  unlink() seems to be about the same speed in ufs as
in ext2fs.  However, not-quite-async writes make it 9 times slower and
sync writes make it 24 times slower.  A fast disk can't compensate for
the slowness of synchronous writes.

Bruce



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