Subject: Re: UVM/other problems for desktop users in current?
To: Jukka Marin <jmarin@pyy.jmp.fi>
From: Frederick Bruckman <fredb@immanent.net>
List: current-users
Date: 12/18/2002 11:33:20
On Wed, 18 Dec 2002, Jukka Marin wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 09:01:29AM -0600, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> > On Wed, 18 Dec 2002, Jukka Marin wrote:
> > > 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 :-).)
>
> Does "softdeps" help the NFS server?  Ie. does nfsd access the local disk
> just like any other application, through the buffer cache?

Yes to the second question. You can even see the file buffer usage
rise when you're accessing the server. I think softdeps would only
help if you were creating a lot of directories, then deleting them,
as for a "cvs update", but it can't hurt.

> How about the NFS client?  Can I use softdeps with NFS?  (I guess I could
> just try it out :-)

No, but the nfs client does some caching of it's own (examine the
output of "nfsstat -c"). For my use, hits are in the 80-95% range,
but if yours isn't, I don't know how to tune that.

Frederick