disabling fsync

[zahlberer]

Hello,

I have been using gentoo for a while, but it was not until I installed Thunderbird and xmoto that I noticed how annoying fsync is.

I mean, a user process should not care about how the kernel syncs data to the disk.

Is there a way to disable fsync for ever?

The ideal way would be configuring sqlite.

A less ideal one would be hacking the kernel.

Thanks for any help.

[jmbreuer]

For people (still) looking for this, and yup, this still is a very real issue - once I launch Thunderbird and just have it running connected to a couple of (admittedly large) IMAP accounts in the background, typing into browser forms and things like shifting between virtual desktops become laggy. Fluctuating from noticeable to breaking.

(I'm posting here since this 'thread' actually comes up in the first ten results when I just google for 'Thunderbird fsync')

Here's some solutions:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/question ... what-to-do

https://www.flamingspork.com/projects/libeatmydata/

There's an ~amd64 masked ebuild for the latter in the official tree.

Also, I've seen that gentoo's system sqlite (which is used by TB by default) is installed with USE=secure-delete by default, turning that off might be one more thing to check out.

Yup, all of this will make the data Thunderbird stores much less crash safe. With IMAP accounts only I don't see a reason to care too much.