Subject: Re: Interactive responsiveness under heavy I/O load
To: Johnny Billquist <bqt@update.uu.se>
From: Hauke Fath <hauke@Espresso.Rhein-Neckar.DE>
List: netbsd-users
Date: 01/27/2004 19:30:43
At 23:43 Uhr +0100 26.1.2004, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>>    Softdep is such a huge performance win, especially for tasks like
>>    extracting a pkgsrc tree, because lots of metadata writes update
>>    the same disk block repetitively (think about adding files one at a
>>    time to the same directory). With softdep, each of these updates is
>>    done in memory (without the sync disk wait) and the resulting final
>>    directory blocks written to disk (again, speaking very broadly).
>
>softdep:s really sounds nice, but last I tried it (a few months ago) it
>still crashed my VAX very predictably, so I'd guess it still isn't good
>enough to turn on for people in general.

Same here on a SparcStation 10. Both with current and 1.6 kernels, softdep
mounts make sure the box locks up during the next /etc/daily run.

	hauke

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