Re: 2.4 kernel tweaking
On Mon, Oct 14, 2002 at 12:54:55PM -0400, christophe barbe wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 14, 2002 at 05:22:45PM +0100, Nyk Tarr wrote:
> > > In my opinion this is not a solution. First I am still not convinced
> > > that it is normal for ext3 to touch the disk when there is no other
> > > activity on the system. Then spinning the disk for 5 minutes seems very
> > > bad from the powersaving point of view and also from the life of the HD.
> >
> > Hard drives sustain most of their wear and use most power on spinning up,
> > it makes sense for most systems (ie desktops/servers etc) to keep the disks
> > spinning all the time. In the majority of cases, then, it isn't a case
> > of 'spinning up' the disks at all. This is not the case on laptops, but
> > we are a minority case. Optimising the commit intervals has been
> > suggested on lkml, but is, apparently rather tricky.
>
> The commit of what? I don't see why there would be a need to commit
> something on an idle system. A commit every 5 secondes when the system
> (and the HD) is used is not a problem.
>
It seems nothing is committed unless there is a dirty block ie
something, somewhere has changed, however small or seemingly
insignificant. It would be pretty difficult to stop _all_ disk activity,
unless a very high percentage of your processes are running elsewhere -
something like a ssh to another box with few processes still running
locally. You'd have to stop *logd for example.
See the discussions at:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=linux.kernel.20011022124751.C5146%40turbolinux.com&rnum=6&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DISO-8859-1%26q%3Dlaptop%2Bmode%2Bcommit%2Bgroup%253Amlist.linux.kernel
and
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=linux.kernel.3CFD453A.B6A43522%40zip.com.au&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DISO-8859-1%26q%3Dlaptop%2Bmode%2Bgroup%253Amlist.linux.kernel
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