On Wed, 18 Dec 2002 15:49:40 +1100 Daniel Carosone <dan@geek.com.au> wrote:

> This is mostly a CVS issue, or rather the impact of CVS's access
> patterns.
> 
> For those experiencing this problem - are you running softdep?
> 

Yes


> People have made the contrast between NetBSD and FreeBSD/Linux.
> FreeBSD is probably using softdep by default (?), Linux is effectively
> mounting async. Do the same on NetBSD, and then compare again.

Hmm. I think async comes with markedly more risks doesn't it? At least thats
how I've read the complaints about Linux FS practices vs BSD. Are you *sure*
this is a good idea?

> 
> Other things to help further:
> 
>   - On my laptop, in order to let the disk stay spun down more of
>     the time, I run filesystems noatime,nodevmtime, further reducing
>     the load and impact of CVS. With the combination of all of
>     these things, I really see nothing like the problems people
>     describe here -- even though the disk traffic is all going
>     through cgd doing crypto in interrupt context.

I'm going to try this next.

> 
>   - In current, there is work under NEW_BUFQ_STRATEGY to address
>     some of the other known problems with dealing with the impact of
>     nasty disk access patterns. It might be worth seeing what effect
>     this has, if you're willing to experiment. I haven't needed to.

I'm going to try list last! :-)

-George