Re: More Slowdown

[David Masover <ninja@slaphack.com>]

Craig Shelley wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-11-15 at 15:13 -0800, Avuton Olrich wrote:
> 
>>It's funny that you mention vim. vim seems to be what _really_ makes
>>my reiser4 do the 'slowdown'. I call it harddrive thrashing cause
>>that's what my wife calls it when she hears it from 5 yards away :)
>>Right before saving or saving/exiting it really does this thrashing,
>>Thank god you said this because I didn't think this 'slowdown' was the
>>same thing I was experiencing.
> 
> 
> This looks to be a similar thing with fsync(). It took approx 10 sec to
> save a file containing the string "Hello World" 
> The results indicate that the time was spent in the fsync() call.

I got sick of waiting for it and nuked the fsync call.  All my kernels
have a custom patch such that sys_fsync just returns true, no matter what.

Why?

Because vim shouldn't fsync, and neither should Evolution.  It's been so
abused that I prefer to just manually run "sync" when I want something
flushed.

Even if fysnc was fast (only flushing the file that needed to flush),
that kind of abuse -- resizing a column -- kind of kills any advantage
of lazy writes.