SoftUpdates, which isn't default yet, is a great way to speed up file creation/deletion time in a safe manner.
It's great for speeding up large untar's, large file removals (/usr/ports), make world, caching webservers, news servers, etc. I've measured 25 times perfomance increases with queue handling in one of our applications.
Enabling Softupdates
To enable it, use 'tunefs', here is an example:
tunefs: soft updates remains unchanged as enabled
If you want to enable it on the / partition, you need to be in single user mode. To double check that softupdates is indeed enabled, try 'mount':
% mount
/dev/twed0s2a on / (ufs, NFS exported, local, noatime, soft-updates)
procfs on /proc (procfs, local)
/dev/twed0s3e on /data (ufs, local, noatime, soft-updates)
Real world performance example
Here is an example of the kind of performance change you might see. The file used is X402src-1.tgz, and it's untarred equivalent.
untar with softupdates: 50.628 seconds
untar without softupdates: 57.204 seconds (13% slower)
directory removal with softupdates: 16.640 seconds
directory removal without softupdates: 43.282 seconds (260% slower)
Thomas Stromberg
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