[Mailman-Developers] Problem with MM after power outage

[Barry Warsaw]

On Fri, 2003-09-12 at 17:40, Harald Meland wrote:

> 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.

Except that when I did some very simple tests, I saw a 97% hit in
performance with fsync turned on.  This on a RH9, ext3 Linux box of the
Dell Optiplex variety.  That makes me very nervous to add in a patch
release that won't have any beta testing.  I've also never seen the bug
on python.org, which may or may not be representative of the world at
large.

I'm happy to re-address this for the next major release, but for 2.1.3 I
don't want to enable fsync by default, and I definitely don't want to do
any probing/guessing of filesystems, etc.

-Barry