Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 15:35:47 -0500 (EST) From: "John S. Dyson" <dyson@iquest.net> To: logix@foobar.franken.de (Harold Gutch) Cc: dwilde1@thuntek.net, kheuer@gwdu60.gwdg.de, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The Linux PR firestorm disaster (w.r.t. FreeBSD) Message-ID: <199903022035.PAA66502@y.dyson.net> In-Reply-To: <19990302184800.B4386@foobar.franken.de> from Harold Gutch at "Mar 2, 99 06:48:00 pm"
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Harold Gutch said: > On Tue, Mar 02, 1999 at 07:55:15AM -0800, Don Wilde wrote: > > FreeBSD uses synchronous writes of data, whereas Linux, by default, uses > > asynchronous writes. This means that Linux doesn't write immediately: > > your data is saved in RAM until the machine is less busy, and then it > > writes. If your machine dies, you've lost the data. FreeBSD makes sure > > your data is saved immediately, and it's so much more efficient that > > even with safer writing policies FreeBSD is faster. > > I saw a posting by Martin Cracauer to a German BSD-newsgroup a > couple of days ago, which can be summed up to "normal synchronous > writes (the 'classic' FreeBSD thing) are slow, asynchronous > writes (what Linux does) are dangerous - softupdates are a little > slower than asynchronous writes, but ensure the reliability of > synchronous writes. > In many cases, it seems that softupdates is slower than full async. However, softupdates, being much more intelligent, can avoid doing data I/O at all under certain circumstances. (Temp files.) Async isn't quite as smart. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dyson@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdyson@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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