Re: Syncing a file's metadata in a portable way

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

bert hubert <ahu@ds9a.nl> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Jul 10, 2004 at 01:14:59PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
> > If only the one file has been written to, an fsync on ext3 shouldn't
> > produce any more writeout than an fsync on ext2.
> (...)
> > Either that, or SQLite is broken.
> 
> I'll show strace and vmstat tomorrow - I found very little writes, no mmap,
> some fsync and massive writeouts. On ext2, performance was two orders of
> magnitude better.
> 

One scenario which could cause this is if the application is writing a
large amount of data to a file and is repeatedly *overwriting* that data. 
And the application is repeatedly adding new blocks to, and fsyncing a
separate file.

strace might tell us that, if the traces are skilfully captured and studied.

You should try data=writeback.  Given that the app is using fsync() for its
own data integrity purposes anyway, you don't need data=ordered.

It's strange though.  databases often preallocate the file space, so a
regular write won't add new blocks to the file and won't allocate any new
metadata.  In this situation, an fsync() will only force a commit once per
second, when the inode mtime changes.