Re: removing an ext2fs file forces disk activity

[Adam Olsen]

On Mon, Mar 25, 2002 at 10:23:25AM -0500, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 25, 2002 at 04:18:05PM +0100, Philip Dodd wrote:
> > One of the things I first noticed when running the Hurd (particularly
> > because it was running with an old and very noisy HD) was the incredible
> > amount of disk activity compared with exactly the same box running any other
> > OS.  This is of course an entirely subjective expression of opinion, and
> > should of course be taken as such :)
> > 
> 
> Well, of course we know about this problem in general.  And trust me
> that it has been worse two years ago :)   Linux has a very superb
> caching for the filesystem, while we have no equivalent caching (we just
> have the pager).  However, I was wondering about whether this particular
> sequence of commands requires disk activity.  Maybe it's just a bug
> somewhere that can be fixed.
> 
> Implementing a proper caching strategy would be a very good task, but it
> is not easy.

I think we should go for a 'good enough' caching strategy, rather than
an 'optimal' caching strategy.  Simply caching 4 megs of the
most-recently-used pages would probably increase peformance
dramatically for most tasks, and I doubt it'd harm any others (unless
it doesn't leave enough memory free to satisfy the pager.)


-- 
Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus