debian unstable & ext3

[Neil Brown]

(posting again from my subscribed address as it is a members' only
list - grumble)
On Thursday August 31, lm at bitmover.com wrote:
> 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).

I've noticed this sort of problem, but it hasn't yet been enough to
make me explore very far....

One thing worth a try is to mount with data=writeback.

Though I sustem that 
  set swapsync=
might be fastest, but might not be what you want.

NeilBrown