[Mailman-Developers] Problem with MM after power outage

[Harald Meland]

[Peter C. Norton]

> On Fri, Sep 12, 2003 at 09:58:18PM +0200, Brad Knowles wrote:
>> At 12:56 PM -0400 2003/09/12, John A. Martin wrote:
>> 
>> > And, moreover, the choice should depend upon the file system and file
>> > system options.  As you know, all Linux boxen do not necessarily only
>> > run ext2 even by distribution default.
>> 
>> 	It's easy enough to check the type of filesystem to be used, and 
>> whether "chatter +S" has been run on the particular directory 
>> structure.
>
> This has gotten silly.  99% of the sites out there don't about the
> tradeoff, and mailman could write synchronously without impacting the
> performance.  Playing fast and loose could be done if a site admin
> wanted it.  Doing OS-specific checks just to set this variable is
> silly because the admin can make the business decision as to whether
> they can afford to let the system run with async writes, write-back
> cache, etc. and its their problem.  

Hear, hear. :-)

Although I haven't done any testing as to how much performance is lost
by fsync(2)ing, I suspect that the sites who actually *need* this lost
performance are (much) more likely to read the upgrade notes than your
average Mailman site admin.

Hence, I think it makes more sense to have the default be "do
fsync(2)", and let any performance-conscious site decide whether it
wants to explicitly value performance over safety.
-- 
Harald