On Tue, Dec 31, 2024 at 06:44:58PM +0100, Marc Haber wrote:
On Tue, Dec 31, 2024 at 10:32:09AM -0700, Soren Stoutner wrote:
On my system, which has a Western Digital Black SN850X NVMe (PCIe 4) formatted
ext4, dpkg runs really fast (and feels like it runs faster than it did a few
years ago on similar hardware). There has been much talk on this list about
performance penalties with dpkg’s current configuration, and some requests for
actual benchmark data showing those performance penalties.
Doing fsyncs to often after tiny writes will also cause write
amplification on the SSD.
The two year old NVMe drive in my primary desktop (which follows sid and
is updated at least once per day--far more dpkg activity than any normal
system) reports 21TB written/3% of the drive's expected endurance. There
is no possibility that I will hit that limit before the drive becomes
completely obsolete e-waste.
For this to be an actual problem rather than a (questionable)
theoretical issue would require someone to be doing continuous dpkg
upgrades to a low-write-endurance SD card...which AFAIK isn't a thing
actual people do. dpkg simply isn't the kind of tool which will cause
issues on an ssd in any reasonable scenario. If this is really a concern
for you, look for tools doing constant syncs (a good example is older
browsers which constantly saved small changes to configuration databases
which could amount to 10s of GB per day); don't look at a tool which in
typical operation doesn't write more than a few megabytes per day.
