On Wed, 18 Dec 2002, Jukka Marin wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 03:49:40PM +1100, Daniel Carosone 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?
>
> No.  Is it safe?  Does it help with NFS (server, client)?  I use it in /tmp,
> but I haven't been brave enough to enable it elsewhere.

"softdeps" are safe. I don't use "mfs" for "/tmp" anymore at all, by
the way, after getting another freeze last week, just as it filled up
(and yes, on a current enough 1.6_STABLE that the "mfs" is mounted
"sync"). On my little 486's running 1.6K, giving up "mfs" seems to
make a huge difference in stability. (One is running X, another is the
NFS server -- I don't try to run mozilla :-).)

"async" isn't really that unsafe, either, for certain uses. I've had
a scratch partition which was mounted async for a long time, and I'd
rarely lose anything, even with a hard freeze in the middle of a
download (but I'd run "sync" by hand after creating or deleting
directories, for good measure). With both "softdep" and "async", after
an fsck, I occasionally see stuff in lost+found that I've recently
deleted. I suppose that's because of the disk cache.

Frederick