On Wed, 11 Apr 2012, Tim Connors <tconnors@rather.puzzling.org> wrote:
Please don't (I had to set vim to turn off fsync. I don't have to override emacs, fortunately). Some of us like our drives to remain spun down, regardless of any autosave behaviour of your editor (I could maybe tolerate fsync for hard save and not using fsync for autosave, but I still
IMHO a correctly operating editor would do autosaves under different file names (which AFAIK they ALL do) and would not call fsync() on the autosave file. As you didn't explicitely request the autosave you can't complain if it doesn't make it to disk.
don't like my editor to delay for 5 seconds while it waits for a drive to spin up (or delay for 2 minutes while it waits for all the disk contention caused by bloatware such as mozilla) just because my fingers typed C-x C-s before asking my brain for permission). Don't forget that sometimes (or often, in my case), we're editing over fuse filesystems to laggy ssh connections on the other side of the country. I *really* want filesystem operations to be asyncronous in such cases.
As has been noted there are ways of making this asynchronous. But the default should be that when an editor says it's written then it really is written. On Wed, 11 Apr 2012, Brian May <brian@microcomaustralia.com.au> wrote:
The days you can assume that Unix servers are stored in machine rooms with guaranteed 100% reliable power feeds (e.g. using UPS) are over.
I think that apart from the very early days it's always been a minority of systems that had a UPS. When I was at university in the early 90's most of the Unix systems were workstations or small servers that appeared to be plugged in to regular power points. It is possible that one of the rooms may have had power points connected to a big UPS, but that seems unlikely. Not that a UPS is 100% reliable. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/