Soft Updates?

xUltra · 07-28-2003, 11:31 AM

"Soft updates change the way the file system performs I/O. They enable metadata to be written less frequently. They can give rise to dramatic performance improvements under certain circumstances, such as file deletion." --The Complete FreeBSD 4th Edition. Published my O'Reilly Community Press

So what are the disadvantages of enabling soft updates???

xUltra · 07-28-2003, 11:43 AM

I found some more information on it... would anyone here recommend not to turn it on a server?

jvds · 07-28-2003, 05:00 PM

I would run it for all things. Its possible in some cicrumstance that power loss might cause slightly more file damage than normal .What is your server doing?

Rgds

Rus

Werpon · 07-29-2003, 07:23 AM

If your machine is going to be a workstation I'd probably enable it. If it's going to be a server, I wouldn't. I once lost my entire /usr partition during a power outage.

I like FreeBSD a lot, but I think that journaled filesystems such as ReiserFS or ext3 are better than SoftUpdates, despite what O'Reilly says.

jemfinch · 07-30-2003, 05:05 AM

There are no disadvantages to using SoftUpdates. They're safer and faster than not using them.

As far as Werpon's story, his loss of his /usr partition couldn't have anything to do with SoftUpdates. if you're running a server, it's all the more important that you use SoftUpdates.

Jeremy

Werpon · 07-30-2003, 12:00 PM

SoftUpdates is not safer. Syncronous writing is the safest approach I can think of, and that's the behavior of the standard filesystem.

You can choose not to trust me, and it'll be okay for me. I repeat I was running a server with SoftUpdates enabled and that I lost one of my partitions during a power outage. The rest of the partitions in the same disk were OK, so I'm pretty sure the disk itself wasn't damaged.

xUltra · 08-01-2003, 02:22 PM

The servers would be running apache, mail, dns, gameservers...