Re: Linux 2.6.29

david
2009-03-29T00:37:28Z

On Fri, 27 Mar 2009, Jeff Garzik wrote:

> Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> Of course, your browsing history database is an excellent example of
>> something you should _not_ care about that much, and where performance is a
>> lot more important than "ooh, if the machine goes down suddenly, I need to
>> be 100% up-to-date". Using fsync on that thing was just stupid, even
>
> If you are doing a ton of web-based work with a bunch of tabs or windows
> open, you really like the post-crash restoration methods that Firefox now
> employs. Some users actually do want to checkpoint/restore their web work,
> regardless of whether it was the browser, the window system or the OS that
> crashed.
>
> You may not care about that, but others do care about the integrity of the
> database that stores the active FF state (Web URLs currently open), a
> database which necessarily changes for each URL visited.

as one of those users with many windows tabs open (a couple hundred
normally), even the curent firefox behavior isn't good enough because it
doesn't let me _not_ load everything back in when a link I go to triggers
a crash in firefox every time it loads.

so what I do is do a git commit in cron every min of the history file. git
can do the fsync as needed to get it to disk reasonably without firefox
needing to do it _for_every_click_

like laptop mode, you need to be able to define "I'm willing to loose this
much activity in the name of performance/power"

ted's suggestion (in his blog) to tweak fsync to 'misbehave' when laptop
mode is enabled (only pushing data out to disk when the disk is awake
anyway, or the time has hit) would really work well for most users.
servers (where you have the data integrity fsync useage) don't use laptop
mode. desktops could use 'laptop mode' with a delay of 0.5 or 1 second and
get prety close the the guarentee that users want without a huge
performance hit.

David Lang

>
>
> As an aside, I find it highly ironic that Firefox gained useful session
> management around the same time that some GNOME jarhead no-op'd GNOME session
> management[1] in X.
>
> Jeff
>
>
>
> [1] http://np237.livejournal.com/22014.html
>
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