*BSD News Article 61116


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From: root@dyson.iquest.net (John S. Dyson)
Subject: Re: The better (more suitable)Unix?? FreeBSD or Linux
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Message-ID: <4fi6gq$3tr@dyson.iquest.net>
Sender: news@iquest.net (News Admin)
Organization: John S. Dyson's home machine
References: <4er9hp$5ng@orb.direct.ca> <DMD8rr.oIB@isil.lloke.dna.fi> <4f9skh$2og@dyson.iquest.net> <DMI5Mt.768@pe1chl.ampr.org>
Date: Sat, 10 Feb 1996 13:27:54 GMT
Lines: 26
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:13574 comp.os.linux.development.system:17071

In article <DMI5Mt.768@pe1chl.ampr.org>,
Rob Janssen <pe1chl@wab-tis.rabobank.nl> wrote:
>In <4f9skh$2og@dyson.iquest.net> root@dyson.iquest.net (John S. Dyson) writes:
>
>>Linux is more vulnerable to filesystem problems due to the delayed writes
>>of metadata (and is the reason that FreeBSD is slower on file
>>create/delete benchmarks.)
>
>It seems to be very hard to get this misconception out of the BSD people's
>heads...
>Sync metadata writes may seem to improve things, but actually it just
>causes your fsck's to return no errors while the files are still
>corrupted.  Not necessarily better.
>
FreeBSD does support async mounts for those who want to maximize the
performance, getting both much quicker metadata perf, and the extremely
fast sequential perf associated with FreeBSD.  You can get both.  Since,
in my normal workstation usage async vs. sync appears to make no significant
difference, most of my filesystems are mounted sync.  My news partition is
mounted async which appears to help by about 50%.  I also mount filesystems that
are being restored async, which helps perhaps 10:1.  For transient files, mfs
is useful (like for /tmp), and for compiles, the -pipe option of gcc is useful.

John Dyson
dyson@freebsd.org