richardb: how about fdatasync? ? richardb: uh, sorry, I just noticed I was reading an IRC discussion of yesterday heh richardb: I wrote that after reading "richardb> ext3 is bad enough (because whenever xapian calls fsync on a file, the whole filesystem gets synced." richardb: but it was more my curiosoty than a suggestion We use fdatasync when it's supported. Which is most linuxes, if not all, I think. Maybe fdatasync avoids the problem of flushing the whole filesystem, so it's not actually a problem. Not really that into filesystems, personally. nice, I'll check with strace if we are actually using fdatasync