Subject: Re: safer git?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 25 Oct 2020 12:45:18 +0000

"brian m. carlson" wrote:
:You can try setting core.fsyncObjectFiles to true.

Super, that's exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to find.

:I suspect a lot of the zero-byte files and any files that end up as
:all-zeros are due to your file system.  The default file system on
:Ubuntu is ext4, IIRC, and if that's what you're using, you can set
:data=journal instead of data=ordered as a mount option.

It is indeed ext4. I'll consider this option; for now I've turned off
write caching as suggested by Randall, which feels like a lighter-weight
approach that should give almost all of the benefit.

:"Randall S. Becker" wrote:
:> I would suggest turning off write-through buffering on your disk. Let writes
:> complete immediately instead of being deferred to sync. Also, this does feel
:> like a disk issue, so fsck or chkdsk /f (or whatever) on your disk urgently.

fsck doesn't seem to be complaining, but I've set it to run every
20 mounts. What I do see is a handful of "orphaned inodes" being
reclaimed on boot after every crash.

:Turning off buffering and caching for your disk drive may make things
:_really_ slow, but it will definitely improve data integrity.

I haven't noticed a big slowdown so far; I'm rarely doing a _lot_ of
writes.

Thanks greatly to both of you for the suggestions.

Hugo