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Posted Feb 3, 2011 16:02 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
In reply to: Plain Text by jeremiah
Parent article: LCA: Lessons from 30 years of Sendmail

It's not only about changing data with vi. Sometimes is about being able to recover critical data from a corrupt file with vi, rather than giving it up because the binary db file is f___ up, and someone forgot the change backup tapes for the last two months, and all you have is last night's backup of an already corrupt file.

Are you really sure a db will buy you something? Do you need ACID? Do you _really_ need an index to find your data? Be sure a database will buy you something before giving up reliability. For instance, have you thought that reading a 80 MB text file takes just a couple of seconds with any modern disk? That's a good million 80-byte records.

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Posted Feb 3, 2011 21:38 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

also keep in mind the problems that firefox has where it can stall for significant amounts of time while it is doing an ACID update to it's bookmark file.

does that file _really_ need ACID protection? I don't think so, I think that just having a fairly recent backup is good enough.

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Posted Feb 4, 2011 1:53 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (1 responses)

The long lag is really a filesystem bug. Newer filesystems have fixed the problem. Firefox shouldn't lag on ext4, xfs or btrfs.

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Posted Feb 4, 2011 1:59 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

the really long lag was a combination of an Ext3 bug and the fact that the browser was trying to get ACID protection of the file.

I still don't think that's appropriate.

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Posted Feb 26, 2011 13:24 UTC (Sat) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

True. For small projects (less than a couple of hundred thousand records perhaps), I just keep data in RAM and serialize to plain text periodically. RAM is cheap, even 100 MB of data structures is practically free, and crazy fast. I like to think lesser external dependencies make deployment easier and crashes won't hurt you all that bad.