I don't know if this is exactly the behaviour that is to be
expected, but I must say that it did feel a bit annoying.

I did the following thing:

cd /; tar xzvf /mnt/maailma/mnt/NetBSD-1.5.2/syssrc.tgz

on a NetBSD 1.5.1 host, where the syssrc.tgz comes from an
1.5 NFS server. I was pretty surprised (it's long since
I extracted syssrc last time) to see the lines just whizz
by at great speed, thanks to softdeps I'm sure.

But then the annoyance hit: at times the tar extraction stops
for a moment, to flush the softdeps (or whatever) most likely,
and this is as expected, but the real problem is that while
the extraction is blocking, all else seems to do so too. From
another xterm window, accessing file systems blocks exactly
as long as the extraction, but this also affects other stuff
(I was browsing with galeon at the moment) and things slow
to a crawl.

Happily, those temporarily stops do not take too much time,
(some seconds, 1-10 probably) but I still found it --- 
not right, I guess.

I'll test things on 1.5.2 (once I get it installed to
both machines later in the evening) to see if things are
any different.

(BTW, why isn't the mail-index search using Google, but
searching from www.netbsd.org does use Google and searches
the mail archives as well?)

-- 
Arto Huusko (arto.huusko@utu.fi) | Diving Is Fun
Divecalc @ http://divecalc.cjb.net