Comment 199 for bug 317781

"The filesystem should be fixed to allocate blocks on *every* commit, not just ones overwriting existing files."

alloc_on_commit mode has been added. Those who want to use it (and take the large associated performance hit) can use it. It's a tradeoff that is and should be in the hands of the individual system administrator. Personally, my machine almost never crashes, so I'd prefer the extra performance.

What the application is doing in this case is broken anyway, and if it fixed that there would be no problem on ext4.

"As for the program -- fsync should *not* be inserted. (Though the unconditional os.remove() should be changed.) It's a bad thing to ritually fsync every file before the rename for a host of reasons described upthread."

fsync() should preferably be used for config file updates, assuming those are reasonably rare, "for a host of reasons described upthread". Otherwise, the user will click "Save" and then the preference change won't actually take effect if the system crashes shortly thereafter. This is true in any filesystem. On some filesystems (not just ext4: XFS certainly, maybe NFS?), you might also get some kind of other bad stuff happening. Explicit user saving of files/preferences/etc. should therefore invoke an fsync() in most cases: you want to make sure the change is committed to stable storage before giving confirmation to the user that it's saved. Text editors already do this, and no one seems to have complained.

If Gaim updates its config file very often for some reason, though, they'd have to weigh the added reliability of fsync() against the performance hit (especially on filesystems like ext3).