Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1764851AbXHDQS6 (ORCPT ); Sat, 4 Aug 2007 12:18:58 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1759289AbXHDQSv (ORCPT ); Sat, 4 Aug 2007 12:18:51 -0400 Received: from smtp2.linux-foundation.org ([207.189.120.14]:44575 "EHLO smtp2.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1758860AbXHDQSu (ORCPT ); Sat, 4 Aug 2007 12:18:50 -0400 Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2007 09:17:44 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: Ingo Molnar cc: Peter Zijlstra , linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, miklos@szeredi.hu, akpm@linux-foundation.org, neilb@suse.de, dgc@sgi.com, tomoki.sekiyama.qu@hitachi.com, nikita@clusterfs.com, trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no, yingchao.zhou@gmail.com, richard@rsk.demon.co.uk Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/23] per device dirty throttling -v8 In-Reply-To: <20070804103347.GA1956@elte.hu> Message-ID: References: <20070803123712.987126000@chello.nl> <20070804063217.GA25069@elte.hu> <20070804070737.GA940@elte.hu> <20070804103347.GA1956@elte.hu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=us-ascii Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1308 Lines: 31 On Sat, 4 Aug 2007, Ingo Molnar wrote: > > [ my personal interest in this is the following regression: every time > > i start a large kernel build with DEBUG_INFO on a quad-core 4GB RAM > > box, i get up to 30 seconds complete pauses in Vim (and most other > > tasks), during plain editing of the source code. (which happens when > > Vim tries to write() to its swap/undo-file.) ] > > hm, it turns out that it's due to vim doing an occasional fsync not only > on writeout, but during normal use too. "set nofsync" in the .vimrc > solves this problem. Yes, that's independent. The fact is, ext3 *sucks* at fsync. I hate hate hate it. It's totally unusable, imnsho. The whole point of fsync() is that it should sync only that one file, and avoid syncing all the other stuff that is going on, and ext3 violates that, because it ends up having to sync the whole log, or something like that. So even if vim really wants to sync a small file, you end up waiting for megabytes of data being written out. I detest logging filesystems. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/