On 3/18/2012 6:25 AM, Peter Grandi wrote: > So in my view 'delaylog' cannot be described boldly and barely > described, especially in this thread, as an improvement in XFS > performance, as it is an improvement in XFS's unsafety to obtain > greater speed, similar to but not as extensive as 'nobarrier'. You have recommended in various past posts on multiple lists that users should max out logbsize and logbufs to increase metadata performance. You made no mention in those posts about safety as you have here. Logbufs are in-memory journal write buffers and are volatile. Delaylog uses in-memory structures that are volatile. So, why do you consider logbufs to be inherently safer than delaylog? Following the logic you've used in this thread, both should be considered equally unsafe. Yet I don't recall you ever preaching against logbufs in the past. Is it because logbufs can 'only' potentially lose 2MB worth of metadata transactions, and delaylog can potentially lose more than 2MB? > In the same way that 'eatmydata': Hardly. From: http://packages.debian.org/sid/eatmydata "This package ... transparently disable fsync ... two side-effects: ... writes data ... quicker ... no longer crash safe ... useful if particular software calls fsync(), sync() etc. frequently but *the data it stores is not that valuable to you* and you may *afford losing it in case of system crash*." So you're comparing delaylog's volatile buffer architecture to software that *intentionally and transparently disables fsync*? So do you believe a similar warning should be attached to the docs for delaylog? And thus to the use of logbufs as well? How about all write buffers/caches in the Linux kernel? Where exactly do you draw the line Peter, between unsafe/safe use of in-memory write buffers? Is there some magical demarcation point between synchronous serial IO, and having gigabytes of inflight write data in memory buffers? -- Stan _______________________________________________ xfs mailing list xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs
