Re: Linux 2.6.29

Linus Torvalds
2009-03-29T21:12:53Z

On Sun, 29 Mar 2009, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> Yep and twenty years on software hasn´t improved

I really think you're gilding the edges of those old memories. The
software 20 years ago wasn't that great. I'd say it was on the whole a
whole lot crappier than it is today.

It's just that we have much higher expectations, and our problem sizes
have grown a _lot_ faster than rotating disk latencies have improved.
People didn't worry about having a hundred megs of dirty data and doing an
'fsync' twenty years ago. Even on big hardware (if you _had_ a hundred
megs of dirty data you didn't worry about latencies of a few seconds),
never mind in the Linux world.

This particular problem really largely boils down to "average memory
capacity has expanded a _lot_ more than harddisk speeds have gone up".

Linus