Re: praise the reiser4 developers!

[Redeeman <redeeman@metanurb.dk>]

On Sat, 2004-04-10 at 20:04, David Masover wrote:
> Hans Reiser said:
> > Redeeman wrote:
> >
> >>i must say! you own!
> quite so.
> 
> >>normally when i sync my portage, the disk noises and it takes ages. with
> >>reiser4 it takes no time, and the disk doesent noise at all. also, now
> >>it is my connection (50kb/s) that limits the speed
> 
> On 768k dsl, I do notice that syncing portage does take less time.  The
> disk does spin, but it doesn't thrash -- the light stays on, but no noise.
> 
> I haven't tried XFS, which seems like the only runner-up, but scares me
> with how many things it patches, and isn't quite as sexy with plugins.
xfs is not as fast on small files. but on large files it can match, i
run xfs for my primary filesystem, but in difference from reiser4, the
harddrive noises alot, where reiser4 on a magically way makes it just
spin around normally

> 
> > thanks so kindly.  I think reiser4 is probably especially effective for
> > laptops.
> 
> It is, in theory.  In practice, I think something other than reiser4 is
> preventing my disk from spinning down.
> 
> It's been months since I've tried a snapshot, though, as my laptop is dead
> and at the manufacturer for service.  This was a hardware problem, as the
> screen is still dead even in BIOS, and reiser4 still worked when I hooked
> up to a CRT.  When it worked, though, the speed boost was pretty
> incredible.
> 
> One thing I hope happens sometime -- I notice that Linux doesn't swap
> until it needs to.  This means that if I have 512 megs of RAM, and 128 or
> so is used by GNOME and such, and I let it idle, then that 128 megs never
> gets swapped out.  It would be helpful if it did -- if RAM was treated
> just like a cache, so that least-frequently-used things get swapped out /
> flushed to disk / purged from the disk cache, while more frequently used
> things stay, probably with a slant towards more recently used things.
> 
> I'm sure there could be more thought put into the actual implementation
> and algorithm used.  Linux does do this nice thing of using all available
> RAM for something, the only problem is, some of the RAM that it "uses" is
> wasted because it is used so infrequently.
> 
> Ultimately, this is geared towards letting my laptop drive spin down for
> longer.  I use GNOME on it to show off to people who thing Linux is not
> user-friendly, or is "a copy of Windows", but it only has 256 megs of ram,
> which doesn't leave nearly enough for reiser4's ramdisk-like operations
> (temporary changes to temporary files that should never touch disk).
> 
> Normally, I sign all my emails, but I keep my PGP key on two machines
> only, and don't trust it to the webmail server.  If anyone cares, let me
> know, and I'll re-send a signed copy of this email.
-- 
Regards, Redeeman
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