*BSD News Article 34379


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From: chrisb@cssc-syd.tansu.com.au (Chris Bitmead)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions,comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: Whats wrong with Linux networking ???
Date: 16 Aug 1994 10:04:26 +1000
Organization: Telecom Australia - CSSC
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References: <RSANDERS.94Aug9003813@hrothgar.mindspring.com> <1994Aug13.012953.5809@cs.brown.edu> <32jp2u$bpb@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM> <32ll52$n7d@quagga.ru.ac.za> <1994Aug15.034939.20997@cs.brown.edu> <michaelv.776931077@ponderous.cc.iastate.edu>
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michaelv@iastate.edu (Michael L. VanLoon) writes:

>Actually, what you're experiencing might not be VM swapage at all, but
>rather synchronous writes to disk.  From what I understand, from other
>posts on this subject, Linux delays writing everything to disk until
>buffers get flushed.  Whereas *BSD always writes superblock/inode/
>whatever data immediately to disk, and only delays writing actual data
>blocks until buffers flush.  This causes *BSD to be a little slower in
>asynchronous disk benchmarks and such, but causes it to trash the
>drive much less severely if your machine were to crash, say, in the
>middle of a large compile.

Is there a way to turn off synchronous writes of meta data in *BSD?