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Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 22:39:04 -0600
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From: Richard Gooch <rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca>
To: Daniel Phillips <phillips@bonn-fries.net>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <mikeg@wen-online.de>, Rik van Riel <riel@conectiva.com.br>,
        Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz>, John Stoffel <stoffel@casc.com>,
        Roger Larsson <roger.larsson@norran.net>, <thunder7@xs4all.nl>,
        Linux-Kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC] Early flush (was: spindown)
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Daniel Phillips writes:
> I never realized how much I didn't like the good old 5 second delay
> between saving an edit and actually getting it written to disk until
> it went away.  Now the question is, did I lose any performance in
> doing that.  What I wrote in the previous email turned out to be
> pretty accurate, so I'll just quote it

Starting I/O immediately if there is no load sounds nice. However,
what about the other case, when the disc is already spun down (and
hence there's no I/O load either)? I want the system to avoid doing
writes while the disc is spun down. I'm quite happy for the system to
accumulate dirtied pages/buffers, reclaiming clean pages as needed,
until it absolutely has to start writing out (or I call sync(2)).

Right now I hack that by setting bdflush parameters to 5 minutes. But
that's not ideal either.

				Regards,

					Richard....
Permanent: rgooch@atnf.csiro.au
Current:   rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca