Paulo Alexandre Pinto Pires <p@ppires.org> writes:

> Raid advocates have already set their stand.  What about softdep?
> I've used it from the very first week after it became available,
> and never had serious problems; what happened to it recently?  My
> system gets totally unusable when I mount /home with softdep enable.

While we're all bitching about new features that give us problems -
has anyone else seen interactive response go completely to hell after
UBC was brought in? In days of old, I could start a huge tar or copy
going, then continue on with my work, hopping from emacs to xterm to
netscape to another xterm back to emacs, and *not even notice* that
the tar was happening. Ever since UBC, if I stop typing in a Window
for more than a few seconds, it takes as much as 10 or 15 seconds to
get control again when I come back to it. This is the case not just
with emacs (which is weird anyway as most of its "code" is actually
data (elisp bytecodes)), but also with NetScape, Mozilla, and even
bash running in an xterm.

We *really* need some tuning knobs or something - I like the idea of
using *unused* memory for disk cache, but not if it means swapping out
applications that I've been using any time in the last 1/2 an hour
(and so may use them again soon).