[Python-Dev] Re: RELEASED Python 2.3.1

[Barry Warsaw]

On Sat, 2003-09-27 at 13:48, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:

> 5. There is a power outage. This is the case where fsync should help:
>     everything up to the write barrier is on disk. Of course, if the
>     disk drive itself has write caching, fsync may have completed
>     without the data being on the disk (this would be an fsync bug, but
>     I believe Linux suffers from this particular bug).
> 
> So in short, fsync(2) helps only in case of a power outage; for normal
> operation, it is not needed. In the case of a power outage, it is
> doubtful whether it has the desired effect.

This was the situation that folks reported causing message loss in
Mailman 2.1.2.  Those folks also reported that adding the fsync helped
them (I guess a UPS would have helped too <wink>).  I've added it to
MM2.1.3, but I haven't enabled it by default.  I'm still not sure the
specific problem can be fixed in better ways (e.g. running on a more
reliable host, running it on a sync'ing filesystem, or maybe opening the
file with O_SYNC).  Also, I did some benchmarking with fsync's added and
on the system I tested I saw a 97% performance hit when always
fsync'ing.  That made me nervous.

Before I enable it unconditionally, I'd want to be more certain that
it's necessary, or useful for the majority of sites, and that the
performance hit is either worth it, not as bad as my benchmarks showed,
or at least not as observably bad under real-world conditions.

-Barry