COW filesystems and the stall problem

COW filesystems and the stall problem

Yes, I was not responding to the point.

The actual point lost me, because I don't see the connection between the high-volume writing and reading you described and copy-on-write and the stalling of the playback. But I also don't know anything about mythtv or btrfs specifically.

I don't think there's anything inherent in COW that means if you flush a large file write sooner that you make more copies of tree data or some group of blocks, but I may have just totally missed the scenario you have in mind.