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Xref: sserve comp.os.386bsd.questions:12561 comp.os.386bsd.misc:3342 Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions,comp.os.386bsd.misc Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!uknet!festival!edcogsci!richard From: richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) Subject: Re: Whats wrong with Linux networking ??? Message-ID: <CutxxH.4Is@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> Organization: HCRC, University of Edinburgh References: <michaelv.776931077@ponderous.cc.iastate.edu> <32ovqa$933@wombat.cssc-syd.tansu.com.au> <32pef4$8ao@u.cc.utah.edu> Date: Sat, 20 Aug 1994 10:46:27 GMT Lines: 26 In article <32pef4$8ao@u.cc.utah.edu> terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) writes: >] Is there a way to turn off synchronous writes of meta data in *BSD? >Does anyone else read this as "How Do I Poke Myself In The Eye"? Not me. I certainly wouldn't want to do it all the time, but in some situations it's worth the risk. For example when restoring a file system, turning off synchronous metadata writes can speed up the restore by a factor of 10. A two hour restore takes about 15 minutes. If you're restoring onto an empty filesystem, it's definitely worth it; the system could crash several times before it's slower than the original. Or consider the situation I'm currently in after our file server was down for three days: we have about 10^5 news articles to unbatch. This runs at about 4 articles/sec with sync writes on, 10 articles/sec with sync writes off. If it fails, all we've lost is some news. SunOS (and I believe some other unixes) have an ioctl for this; adding it to *BSD would be worthwhile. -- Richard -- Richard Tobin, HCRC, Edinburgh University R.Tobin@ed.ac.uk Ooooh! I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.