Re: [PATCH 00/23] per device dirty throttling -v8

Ingo Molnar
2007-08-04T16:38:11Z

* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> > hm, it turns out that it's due to vim doing an occasional fsync not
> > only on writeout, but during normal use too. "set nofsync" in the
> > .vimrc solves this problem.
>
> Yes, that's independent. The fact is, ext3 *sucks* at fsync. I hate
> hate hate it. It's totally unusable, imnsho.

yeah, it's really ugly. But otherwise i've got no real complaint about
ext3 - with the obligatory qualification that "noatime,nodiratime" in
/etc/fstab is a must. This speeds up things very visibly - especially
when lots of files are accessed. It's kind of weird that every Linux
desktop and server is hurt by a noticeable IO performance slowdown due
to the constant atime updates, while there's just two real users of it:
tmpwatch [which can be configured to use ctime so it's not a big issue]
and some backup tools. (Ok, and mail-notify too i guess.) Out of tens of
thousands of applications. So for most file workloads we give Windows a
20%-30% performance edge, for almost nothing. (for RAM-starved kernel
builds the performance difference between atime and noatime+nodiratime
setups is more on the order of 40%)

Ingo