From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] lucio-
From: geoff@collyer.net
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Date: Mon,  4 Mar 2002 16:10:43 -0800
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It depends what you mean by ``bogs down the fileserver''.  Depending
on how many dirty blocks are in the mag disk cache, triggering a dump
to worm disks makes the file server completely unresponsive to
requests from the network for anywhere from a few seconds to a couple
of minutes while the copy-on-write fork of the file system is
performed.  Thereafter, it can take quite a while (depending on the
speed of worm writing) to complete the dump, but performance of the
file server is essentially unaffected.

So warning people in advance of a dump would give them time to take a
short break and get coffee or coke without feeling annoyed.  I have
occasionally wished for a more direct means of notifcation than mail,
perhaps the ability to write a short message after the time in a
vismon window or pop up an acme window containing a brief message.