Comment 133 for bug 317781

@Theodore,

> Note that the "fsync causes performance problems meme got" started
> precisely because of ext3's "data=ordered" mode. This is what causes
> all dirty blocks to be pushed out to disks on an fsync(). Using ext4 with
> delayed allocation, or ext3 with data=writeback, fsync() is actually quite fast.

While that may be true (and I suppose it is ;-)) what happens to all those users sticking to ext3 or similar fs' when "suddenly" all apps to fsync() on every occassion?

It may not hurt ext4 performance that much but probably other fs' performance.

I still think the solution lies somewhere between "fix the apps" and "fix the fs". Correct me if I am wrong but I read, currently Ext4 does (for yet unknown reasons) out-of-order flushing between data and meta data which hopefully can be fixed without affecting performance too much while improving integrity on crashes. Still it is important to fix the apps which still rely on Ext3s behaviour too much.

/End of @Theodore

Side note:

I'm using XFS so Ext4 isn't my preference but this is still interesting for me as it looks like XFS and Ext4 share the same oddities that lead to truncated configs in e.g. KDE4. I lost my kmailrc due to this several times, including all my filters, account settings, folder settings etc... (btw: a situation which could be improved if KMail wouldn't work with a single monolithic config) The situation was already present with KDE3 and got worse with KDE4 and latest NVIDIA-drivers which is currently a not-so-stable combination on some hardware (rock-solid on my Intel-based system at home, pretty unstable on my AMD/Via-based system at work). And now a clue: Also an open-source driver could have made the system freeze - that's not a single fault of closed-source drivers. So some of the arguments here are just irrelevant. That also holds true for the config database vs. tiny config files arguments.