[pacman-dev] delay writes a fsync

[Allan McRae]

Hi,

You have probably heard about this: 
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/11/2031231

Here is the link to the bug report that describes the cause of the 
problem: 
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781/comments/54

A key part of the bug report comment...
Applications are expected to use fsync() or fdatasync(), and if that 
impacts their performance too much, to use a single berkdb or other 
binary database file, and not do something stupid with hundreds of tiny 
text files that only hold a few bytes of data in each text file.

Hmmm...  something sound familiar there? 

So what should we do? Maybe, add some sort of syncing after a db write. 
But then after each file or just at the end of the transaction?

Allan