From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Jun 15 16:22:43 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mailsrv.otenet.gr (mailsrv.otenet.gr [195.170.0.5]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 49AD137B406 for ; Fri, 15 Jun 2001 16:22:39 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from keramida@ceid.upatras.gr) Received: from hades.hell.gr (patr530-a011.otenet.gr [212.205.215.11]) by mailsrv.otenet.gr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id f5FNMap23759; Sat, 16 Jun 2001 02:22:36 +0300 (EEST) Received: (from charon@localhost) by hades.hell.gr (8.11.3/8.11.3) id f5FNMdq56696; Sat, 16 Jun 2001 02:22:39 +0300 (EEST) (envelope-from keramida@ceid.upatras.gr) Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 02:22:39 +0300 From: Giorgos Keramidas To: Josh Osborne Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Sysadmin article Message-ID: <20010616022239.A54416@hades.hell.gr> References: <20010615213739.B12591@hades.hell.gr> <200106152232.PAA02957@smtpout.mac.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <200106152232.PAA02957@smtpout.mac.com>; from stripes@mac.com on Fri, Jun 15, 2001 at 06:31:12PM -0400 X-PGP-Fingerprint: 3A 75 52 EB F1 58 56 0D - C5 B8 21 B6 1B 5E 4A C2 X-URL: http://students.ceid.upatras.gr/~keramida/index.html 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 Fri, Jun 15, 2001 at 06:31:12PM -0400, Josh Osborne wrote: > > On Friday, June 15, 2001, at 02:37 PM, Giorgos Keramidas wrote: > >> On Thu, Jun 14, 2001 at 10:23:21PM -0400, Rajappa Iyer wrote: >>> http://www.sysadminmag.com/articles/2001/0107/0107a/0107a.htm >>> >>> Any obvious reasons why FreeBSD performed so poorly for these people? >> >> Yes, it's not very difficult to guess why. If you read the tuning(7) >> manpage in recent 4.x FreeBSD systems you will notice that even the >> order in which you lay out the partitions on the disks ruding >> installation time can play a significant role in filesystem speed. >> Softupdates are disabled by default, and for a good reason too >> (reliability is more important than raw speed to the people who >> install FreeBSD for the first time; if it isn't they can always enable >> softupdates later on). [...] > > Is softupdates known to be unreliable, or is it merely a distrust of > new code? Matt has explained this better than I could ever do, in his tuning(7) manpage -- a recent, but very valuable addition to our manpages. To quote the manpage: First, softupdates guarentees filesystem consistency in the case of a crash but could very easily be several seconds (even a minute!) behind updating the physical disk. If you crash you may lose more work then otherwise. Secondly, softupdates delays the freeing of filesystem blocks. If you have a filesystem (such as the root filesystem) which is close to full, doing a major update of it, e.g. make installworld, can run it out of space and cause the update to fail. -giorgos To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message