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That's the problem...

That's the problem...

Posted Feb 2, 2012 3:45 UTC (Thu) by tconnors (guest, #60528)
In reply to: That's the problem... by dlang
Parent article: XFS: the filesystem of the future?

> For other developers, the fact that fsync performance is so horrible on the default filesystem for many distros has trained a generation of programmers to NOT use fsync (because it kills performance in ways that users complain about)

Then there's the fact that fsync will spin up your disks if you were trying to keep them spun down (to the point where on laptops, I try to use 30 minute journal commit times, and manually invoke sync when I absolutely want something committed). I don't want or need an absolute gaurantee that the new file has hit the disk consistent with metadata. I want an absolute guarantee that /either/ the new file or the old file is there consistent with the relevant metadata. ext3 did this. It's damn obvious what rename() means - there should be no need for every developer to go through all code in existance and change semantics of code that used to work well *in practice*. XFS loses files everytime power fails *in practice*. If I need to compare to backup *everytime* power fails, then I might as well be writing all my data to volatile RAM and do away with spinning rust all together, because that's all that XFS is good for.


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