Re: Speeding up dpkg, a proposal

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

Adrian von Bidder <avbidder@fortytwo.ch> writes:

> On Wednesday 02 March 2011 17.02:11 Marius Vollmer wrote:
>> - Instead, we move all packages that are to be unpacked into
>>   half-installed / reinstreq before touching the first one, and put a
>>   big sync() right before carefully writing /var/lib/dpkg/status.
>
> You don't want to do this. While production systems usually are upgraded in 
> downtime windows (with less load), it is sometimes necessary to install some 
> package (tcpdump or whatever to diagnose problems...) while the system is 
> under high load. Especially when you're trying to find out why the machine 
> has a load of 20 and you can't afford to kill it...
>
> On a machine with lots of RAM (== disk cache...) and high I/O load, you 
> don't want to do a (global!) sync().  This can totally kill the machine for 
> 20min or more and is a big no go.
>
> -- vbi

Then don't use the option. It should definetly be an option:

sync / fs sync / fsync / sync only metadata / single sync at end / no sync at all

MfG
        Goswin