On Mon, 27 May 2013, "Trent W. Buck" <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
This happened because ext4's default write delay was a lot longer than ext3's default, which led to data loss in unusual cases, and the increased syncing dpkg added to deal with that ran into serious performance issues on btrfs.
My bug report that you reference only mentions Ext4. But when I found the bug in rpm I was using XFS. My main concern at the time was with the way XFS works, but I didn't want people to get too focussed on one filesystem, I was afraid someone would say "just don't use XFS for the root fs then".
In Debian 7 you can add force-unsafe-io to dpkg.cfg to turn off some of these syncs; using eatmydata (LD_PRELOAD wrapper than noops sync syscalls) makes it slightly faster still, and works on Debian 6 and Ubuntu 10.04.
http://bugs.debian.org/430958 is the bug you're referring to? http://bugs.debian.org/575891 is mine :-)
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