Ts'o: Delayed allocation and the zero-length file problem
Whats the best path forward? For now, what I would recommend to Ubuntu gamers whose systems crash all the time and who want to use ext4, to use the nodelalloc mount option. I havent quantified what the performance penalty will be for this mode of operation, but the performance will be better than ext3, and at least this way they wont have to worry about files getting lost as a result of delayed allocation. Long term, application writers who are worried about files getting lost on an unclean shutdown really should use fsync."
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