From: sct@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Stephen Tweedie) Subject: Re: Would it be safe to let only reboot do syncs? Date: 2 Apr 1993 00:54:42 GMT
In article <1pbs53$g76@iamk4515.mathematik.uni-karlsruhe.de>, bernd@iamk4515.mathematik.uni-karlsruhe.de (Bernd Wiebelt) writes:
> With all those new SYSTEMV-like inits I was wondering if it would
> be save to leave update out of my rc-script. After all, the system
> syncs if I reboot it (of course, I have to use the soft-reboot),
> so I don't know where I should use update.
> So, I tend to leave out update and sync by rebooting or
> syncing myself. Could someone tell me, if I am doing
> something really dangerous????
Yes - yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes !!!!
You are leaving yourself open to trashing your entire filesystem if
you don't sync reasonably frequently. You will also find that,
paradoxically, your performance will steadily degrade to the point
where it is unbearably slow if you remove /etc/update, since the
buffer cache will eventually fill up with dirty buffers so that you
are going to disk for every read access. After enough of this the
kernel will in fact start to sync itself, but you don't want to get to
this point.
Trust me - /etc/update.
Cheers,
Stephen Tweedie.