On Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:08:47 +0000, Olly Betts <olly@survex.com> wrote:
> For the issue of a background task interfering with interactive use, the feel
> arguably matters more than the throughput.
> 
> I'll probably put that patch in 1.0.19, and look at moving all the fdatasync()
> calls together.  This is http://trac.xapian.org/ticket/426 BTW.
> 
> The kernel should be able to handle this workload better though, so I would
> say it was worthwhile to bring up on LKML if you have the energy.  It certainly
> isn't just you, as apt-xapian-index seems to trigger it for some Ubuntu users,
> and madduck mentioned it on #notmuch a week or so ago.

Alright. This issue has been bothering me for a very long time and it's frankly
pretty pathetic how badly the kernel falls apart under this sort of workload.
I just wrote up a message (4b9fa440.12135e0a.7fc8.ffffe745@mx.google.com), so
we'll see what happens. In the past kernel developers have been very eager to
write this issue off as not reproducible enough (perhaps wisely), so if anyone
has anything to say, please contribute it to the thread.

Thanks!

- Ben