> If the memory does get written to again before the writeout timeout
> then yeah its used some cpu, memory, pci, etc that it didn't have
> to.
It will presumably also have filled the cache with the writeout data.
> > Ultimately its all a tradeoff. Do you write now, or do you hold off
> > and hope that you can throw away some of the writes because new stuff
> > will home in to overwrite them?
>
> Yes it is a tradeoff. Having an idle disk gives more weight to "write now".
Not necessarily. What if you are using a solid state disk which only
allows a relatively low number of re-write cycles? What if the disk
is spun down, and spinning it up uses a lot of power? On a laptop,
you don't necessarily want the disk spinning up just to write one
sector.
John.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Mar 31 2003 - 22:00:37 EST