On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 10:37 AM, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 10:28 AM, erik quanstrom
  this is the same
> dillema any non content-addressed disk has.  performance
> vs. safety.  and of course one size doesn't fit all, so there are knobs in
> most disks to turn off write caching.

it's not as obvious a tradeoff as it seems.

Anyway, I'm more interested in hearing from people who do something
with the code.

ron


Unless before you write to venti, you store stuff durably locally, and have a way to replay lost data, you can't be sure the data in venti is really stored, when venti ACKs your request to store data, it's nice to know it's durably there.

So yes, it will potentially perform worse, but you're trading off actual durability for performance.

One could go on tangents for crash-only designs, fault tolerance etc... but that'd be digging the hole deeper.

Dave