Re: Linux 2.6.29

Andreas T.Auer
2009-03-28T11:57:36Z

On 28.03.2009 03:38 Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Mar 2009, Mark Lord wrote:
>
>> Okay, I'll bite. Exactly which version of FF has that variable?
>> Cuz it ain't in the FF 3.0.8 that I'm running here.
>>
>
> I'd suspect that I mistyped it, but I just cut-and-pasted it from my
email
> to make sure. Maybe you did. What happens if you just write "sync" in the
> Filter: box? Nothing matches?
>
>
No, not with my iceweasel 3.0.7 (Debian/testing).

I couldn't find anything in the Debian patch to the source code, but the
source code contains
toolkit/components/contentprefs/src/nsContentPrefService.js 733-746:

// Turn off disk synchronization checking to reduce disk churn and
speed up
// operations when prefs are changed rapidly (such as when a user
repeatedly
// changes the value of the browser zoom setting for a site).
//
// Note: this could cause database corruption if the OS crashes or
machine
// loses power before the data gets written to disk, but this is
considered
// a reasonable risk for the not-so-critical data stored in this
database.
//
// If you really don't want to take this risk, however, just set the
// toolkit.storage.synchronous pref to 1 (NORMAL synchronization) or 2
// (FULL synchronization), in which case
mozStorageConnection::Initialize
// will use that value, and we won't override it here.
if (!this._prefSvc.prefHasUserValue("toolkit.storage.synchronous"))
dbConnection.executeSimpleSQL("PRAGMA synchronous = OFF");

Probably they preferred the default value "off" so much that they even
dropped the entry in standard configuration.
> Do you see firefox pausing a lot under disk load?
I see iceweasel pausing/blocking a lot when loading stalling webpages,
but that's a different topic.