Ron Johnson <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:24:36
-0500:
It seems to me that's more likely to cause huge issues than the
comparatively small 1/3 gig tasks.nzb file that you've been complaining
about, particularly since the kernel should be caching the file and it
will normally be updating fast enough that the writes won't all get to
disk.
????
I see tasks.nzb getting rewritten almost on a continuous basis. The
issue is much more noticeable now that I'm on giganews and my nntp
bandwidth has sextupled.
Yes, but what I'm saying is that if your write-caching is set correctly
(you may have to tweak the parameters a bit as they're normally set to ~5
seconds and 5 & 10% of RAM background and foreground flush, vm.dirty* in
sysctl.conf, at least here, /proc/sys/vm/dirty* to access the file
interface directly), with decent speed downloading, the rewrites should
be triggered fast enough that the file never expires out of write cache
and actually gets written to disk, because before it does, it's updated
again. Thus, that should be mostly memory-only writes, to the write-
cache, with another write before it actually gets updated on disk, and
the actual disk file should only be updated when there's enough of a lull
in activity to allow the write-cache to expire without getting updated
and resetting the clock before it's written.