Re: fifo and [acm]time

[Alan Barrett <apb%cequrux.com@localhost>]

On Mon, 26 Dec 2011, Taylor R Campbell wrote:
> > Is one inode update per minute enough to be a significant 
> > issue?
>
> It means the disk must continue spinning and, e.g., will 
> continue to draw power from a laptop battery to do so, even when 
> the system is functionally idle.

I think that's a more general problem.  It would be nice if all 
updates to atime/mtime/ctime could be buffered in memory (not 
committed to stable storage) until either the disk happens to be 
spinning anyway, or the amount of memory "wasted" in buffering the 
updates is too large, or the updates are forced using a mechanism 
like fsync(2) or sync(2).

I even want syslogd's writes to /var/log/messages to be buffered 
until the disk happens to be spinning anyway.

--apb (Alan Barrett)