Re: More on 2.1.65 slowdown (disc thrashing)
Bill Hawes (whawes@star.net)
Fri, 21 Nov 1997 08:39:22 -0500
Richard Gooch wrote:
> Hi, all. To followup on my previous message where I reported a
> slowdown and increased disc head movement when running latex2html on a
> document, I've had a look at what perl does and distilled the essence.
>
> The attached programme demonstrates the point. With kernel 2.1.42 and
> 2.1.62 it generates steady disc activity, but with relatively little
> head movement. Running with kernel 2.1.65 causes a lot of head
> movement.
> fsync ( fileno (fp) );
IIRC the fsync() function in ext2 was changed into a plain sync(). The
reason for this is that fsync() was extremely slow on large files, much
slower than a full sync would be.
Perhaps the decision to sync or fsync could be made on the basis of the
file size?
Regards,
Bill