Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 3 Apr 2009 00:54:14 -0400 | From | Theodore Tso <> | Subject | Re: Ext4 and the "30 second window of death" |
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On Fri, Apr 03, 2009 at 02:36:03AM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: > > if spinning down a drive saves so little power that it wouldn't make a > > significant difference to battery lift to leave it on, why does anyone > > bother to spin the drive down? > > There's various circumstances in which it's beneficial. The difference > between an optimal algorithm for typical use and an optimal algorithm > for typical use where there's an fsync() every 5 minutes isn't actually > that great.
More to the point, if an application is insane enough to push 2.5 megabytes to disk every single time you click on a web page (this is excluding the cache; I had my firefox cache pointed at /tmp when I did this measurement), *and* you are running the WiFi for the browser, *and* the browser is running flash applications, etc., whether you defer the writes or not, you're going to be burning a lot of power. Fundamentally, if an application needs to be writing hundreds of files or hundreds of kilibytes or more of data all the time, there's something wrong with the application.
If some KDE applications needs to rewrite hundreds of files at desktop startup, when the user hasn't even changed any configuration options yet (this is that desktop **startup**, mind you, where this was reported), then you're going to burning a lot of power. Anything we do at the filesystem level is really going to be at the margins.
The annoying thing is the applications programmers aren't willing to fix their d*mn applications, and instead heap all of the blame on the filesystem. I will be the first to admit that filesystem designers have to do their part, and once I realized how bad and sloppy people had gotten with fsync(), and needlessly rewriting files, I implemented the ext4 workaround patches *first*. I only started talking about how application programmers might make changes to obey the established standards and work with other filesystems after I had put my own house in order. These are system-wide problems we are talking about, that will require system-wide solutions. I can provide workarounds for existing application behaviours, but claiming that applications can never change, and we must always accomodate the way applications are currently working and are designed is going to be a losing strategy for us all.
- Ted
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