From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Jan 10 02:59:16 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.4/8.8.4) id CAA05593 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 10 Jan 1997 02:59:16 -0800 (PST) Received: from thelab.hub.org (hal-ns1-24.netcom.ca [207.181.94.88]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.4/8.8.4) with ESMTP id CAA05587 for ; Fri, 10 Jan 1997 02:59:12 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (scrappy@localhost) by thelab.hub.org (8.8.4/8.8.2) with SMTP id GAA15378 for ; Fri, 10 Jan 1997 06:59:09 -0400 (AST) X-Authentication-Warning: thelab.hub.org: scrappy owned process doing -bs Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 06:59:08 -0400 (AST) From: The Hermit Hacker To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: mount -o async on a news servre Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Hiya... Exactly *how* dangerous is setting a file system to async? In my case, I'm braving it on a news server, just the ccd device that contains both the news admin and spool directories. The drive is local to the system. My understanding of asynchronous I/O is that it doesn't wait for an acknowledgement from the system before going to the next write (only, its a very basic understanding?), so I'm curiuos as how it would handle writting the history file itself? The only risk that I can see is that if the system crashes, I'll have (might have) a corrupted file system, but is that my only risk? ie. if I turned on async for a period of time (long enough for a backlog from one system to catch up?) and then turned it back off again, would that be reasonably safe? BTW...what exactly does fastfs do? My understanding is that this is basically what it does, turns the file system to be async vs sync... Thanks...