From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG  Fri Nov 20 12:57:58 2009
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Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:57:56 +0100
From: Mikael Bak <mikael@t-online.hu>
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Subject: Recommendations on when to use soft updates
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Hi list,

I'm quite new to FreeBSD.
I would like to know if there are any official recommendations on when
to use soft updates and when not to use them.

I currently maintain only one FreeBSD machine.

$ uname -v
FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE-p4 #0: Fri Oct  2 08:22:32 UTC 2009
root@amd64-builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC

I have two identical SATA disks in a raid1 using gmirror like this:

$ df -h
Filesystem            Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/mirror/gm0s1a    3.9G    303M    3.3G     8%    /
devfs                 1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
/dev/mirror/gm0s1d    989M    1.0M    909M     0%    /tmp
/dev/mirror/gm0s1e     48G    1.7G     43G     4%    /usr
/dev/mirror/gm0s1f     53G    1.2G     48G     2%    /var
devfs                 1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /var/named/dev

Currently /usr and /var uses soft updates, but / does not.

The machine acts as a front MX with lots of reads and writes in /var.

Is this a reasonable setup?

TIA,
Mikael