Re: Speeding up dpkg, a proposal
On Fri, 18 Mar 2011, Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de> wrote:
> > 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:
It's a pity that there is no kernel support for synching one filesystem (or
maybe a few filesystems).
I recently had a situation where I was doing a backup to a USB flash device
and I decided to install some Debian packages. The sync() didn't complete
until the backup completed because the write-back buffers were never empty!
If dpkg had only sync'd the filesystems used for Debian files (IE ones on the
hard drive) then the package install would have taken a fraction of the time
and I could have used the programs in question while the backup was running.
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