Re: Is ext3 flush data to disk when files are closed?

[Badari Pulavarty <pbadari@gmail.com>]

On Wed, 2005-10-19 at 11:31 -0400, Xin Zhao wrote:
> As far as I know, if an application modifies a file on an ext3 file
> ssytem, it actually change the page cache, and the dirty pages will be
> flushed to disk by kupdate periodically.
> 
> My question is: if a file is to be closed, but some of its data pages
> are marked as dirty, will system block on close() and wait for dirty
> pages being flushed to disk? If so, it seems to decrease performance
> significantly if a lot of updates on many small files are involved.
> 
> Can someone point me to the right place to check how it works? Thanks!

On the last close() of the file, it should be flushed through ..

	iput_final() -> generic_drop_inode() -> write_inode_now()
		-> __writeback_single_inode() -> __sync_single_inode()
			-> do_writepages()


Thanks,
Badari