6386 shutdown: I CAN'T BELIEVE at&t was really this stupid!

[Christian Bertin]

In article <12044 at bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>, jfc at athena.mit.edu (John F Carr) writes:
  (talking about the 'update' daemon)
>
> It doesn't appear to place much load on a system to do this twice
> per minute (perhaps 2 minutes CPU per day of runtime).
> 
>     --John Carr (jfc at athena.mit.edu)


If you have a large buffer cache (1Mb on my system) and if you do a lot of
compiles, or if you do anything that creates large temporary files, you can
waste a LOT of time sync'ing files that should never have been written out
to disk. The last time I tried to measure this, a 3 hour compile session went
down to 2:40 after I changed the sync time from 30 seconds to 2 minutes.

At the very least, 'update' should take an optionnal argument to customize the
sync intervals.

Chris
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