On 06/05/2011 06:14, CoolCold wrote:

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 3:38 PM, David Brown[off-list ref]
wrote:

quoted

On 05/05/2011 12:41, Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote:

quoted

On Thu, May 05, 2011 at 09:26:45AM +0200, David Brown wrote:

quoted

On 05/05/2011 02:40, Liam Kurmos wrote:

quoted

Cheers Roberto,

I've got the gist of the far layout from looking at
wikipedia. There is some clever stuff going on that i had
never considered. i'm going for f2 for my system drive.

Liam

For general use, raid10,f2 is often the best choice.  The only
disadvantage is if you have applications that make a lot of
synchronised writes, as writes take longer (everything must be
written twice, and because the data is spread out there is more
head movement).  For most writes this doesn't matter - the OS
caches the writes, and the app continues on its way, so the
writes are done when the disks are not otherwise used.  But if
you have synchronous writes, so that the app will wait for the
write to complete, it will be slower (compared to raid10,n2 or
raid10,o2).

Yes syncroneous writes would be significantly slower. I have not
seen benchmarks on it, tho. Which applications typically use
syncroneous IO? Maybe not that many. Do databases do that, eg
postgresql and mysql?

Database servers do use synchronous writes (or fsync() calls), but
I suspect that they won't suffer much if these are slow unless you
have a great deal of writes - they typically write to the
transaction log, fsync(), write to the database files, fsync(),
then write to the log again and fsync().  But they will buffer up
their writes as needed in a separate thread or process - it should
not hinder their read processes.

Lots of other applications also use fsync() whenever they want to
be sure that data is written to the disk.  A prime example is
sqlite, which is used by many other programs.  If you have your
disk systems and file systems set up as a typical home user, there
is little problem - the disk write caches and file system caches
will ensure that the app thinks the write is complete long before
it hits the disk surfaces anyway (thus negating the whole point of
using fsync() in the first place...).  But if you have a more
paranoid setup, so that your databases or other files will not get
corrupted by power fails or OS crashes, then you have write
barriers enabled on the filesystems and write caches disabled on
the disks.

I guess you mess things a bit - one should disable write cache or
enable barriers at one time, not both. Here goes quote from XFS faq:
"Write barrier support is enabled by default in XFS since kernel
version 2.6.17. It is disabled by mounting the filesystem with
"nobarrier". Barrier support will flush the write back cache at the
appropriate times (such as on XFS log writes). "
http://xfs.org/index.php/XFS_FAQ#Write_barrier_support.

Yes, thanks.  Usually I don't need to think about these things much, and
when I do, I always have to look up the details to make sure I get the
combinations right.



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