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koopajah
Is there a video recorded of the presentation somewhere? This seemed really interesting
delta1
I was really hoping for a video, actually. Audio would suffice too :)
ntoshev
Slide 6: "[Disk] throughput: 768 MB/sec on SATA 3" is misleading, consumer-grade rotating disks barely fill SATA 1 with ~70 MB/sec. SSD are faster in raw transfer, and if you have a RAID you are not limited by a single SATA channel any more.

Slide 13: "Laugh at MongoDB" is pretty stupid, mongo makes certain trade-offs that are not for everyone, but they are still meaningful.

The presentation doesn't explore the RAID options, which is a shame.

mevodig
He's referring to the bus speed of SATA 3 as an upper bound -- but like you mentioned, if you throw RAID and such into the mix, I'm not so sure either that it's a very useful number.
CJefferson
This talk totally failed to properly discuss the issues of the various kinds of fsync, instead (it seems to me) just making a selection of vague comments. That is a shame, as really properly understanding file integrity is a really important issue, which is very easy to get very wrong.

When ext4 came out, I remember a large number of apps losing data, as the metadata and 'normal data' caches can get out of order, meaning that:

Write file B. Rename B -> A.

Can result (after a crash) in A being empty, as the rename can occur before the contents of B are actually written.

Swannie
Agreed. These slides are like "Disks are not memory 101". I'd hope the talk went into more details.

After an hour or so reading semi-related material I have an understanding that goes beyond these basics :-/

wazoox
Paint me unimpressed. "eat my Data" was a way, way better and deeper presentation:

http://www.oscon.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/3172

Get the presentation here: http://flamingspork.com/talks/2007/06/eat_my_data.odp

Swannie
Thank you for that link. This is a far more interesting presentation than the OT. (Though it does assume some prior knowledge, like what fsync is, etc.)