debian unstable & ext3

[Larry McVoy]

I'm running 

Linux travis 2.6.15-1-686 #2 Mon Mar 6 15:27:08 UTC 2006 i686 GNU/Linux

on a laptop with ext3 on /

Some time ago things started getting weird in the following way: I do a
fairly normal hack, ^Z, make, test loop when developing and it seems
that vim is calling fsync or sync and that is then flushing everything
to disk.  My tests create maybe 10 dozen files in ~30MB and for some
reason this is taking 4 seconds to flush.

I'm not sure if ext3, the kernel, or vim is the problem.  I already
googled and set

set swapsync=sync
set nofsync

in my .exrc but that hasn't helped.

Has anyone else seen this and do they have a work around?  I'm about to
switch to reiserfs and that's a lot of fuss for what should be a simple
problem (I hope).

Thanks,
-- 
---
Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com