The vfs.vmiodirenable sysctl(8) variable may be set to either 0 (off) or 1 (on). It is set to 1 by default. This variable controls how directories are cached by the system. Most directories are small, using just a single fragment (typically 1 K) in the file system and typically 512 bytes in the buffer cache. With this variable turned off, the buffer cache will only cache a fixed number of directories, even if the system has a huge amount of memory. When turned on, this sysctl(8) allows the buffer cache to use the VM page cache to cache the directories, making all the memory available for caching directories. However, the minimum in-core memory used to cache a directory is the physical page size (typically 4 K) rather than 512  bytes. Keeping this option enabled is recommended if the system is running any services which manipulate large numbers of files. Such services can include web caches, large mail systems, and news systems. Keeping this option on will generally not reduce performance, even with the wasted memory, but one should experiment to find out.

The vfs.write_behind sysctl(8) variable defaults to 1 (on). This tells the file system to issue media writes as full clusters are collected, which typically occurs when writing large sequential files. This avoids saturating the buffer cache with dirty buffers when it would not benefit I/O performance. However, this may stall processes and under certain circumstances should be turned off.

The vfs.hirunningspace sysctl(8) variable determines how much outstanding write I/O may be queued to disk controllers system-wide at any given instance. The default is usually sufficient, but on machines with many disks, try bumping it up to four or five megabytes. Setting too high a value which exceeds the buffer cache's write threshold can lead to bad clustering performance. Do not set this value arbitrarily high as higher write values may add latency to reads occurring at the same time.

There are various other buffer cache and VM page cache related sysctl(8) values. Modifying these values is not recommended as the VM system does a good job of automatically tuning itself.

The vm.swap_idle_enabled sysctl(8) variable is useful in large multi-user systems with many active login users and lots of idle processes. Such systems tend to generate continuous pressure on free memory reserves. Turning this feature on and tweaking the swapout hysteresis (in idle seconds) via vm.swap_idle_threshold1 and vm.swap_idle_threshold2 depresses the priority of memory pages associated with idle processes more quickly then the normal pageout algorithm. This gives a helping hand to the pageout daemon. Only turn this option on if needed, because the tradeoff is essentially pre-page memory sooner rather than later which eats more swap and disk bandwidth. In a small system this option will have a determinable effect, but in a large system that is already doing moderate paging, this option allows the VM system to stage whole processes into and out of memory easily.

Turning off IDE write caching reduces write bandwidth to IDE disks, but may sometimes be necessary due to data consistency issues introduced by hard drive vendors. The problem is that some IDE drives lie about when a write completes. With IDE write caching turned on, IDE hard drives write data to disk out of order and will sometimes delay writing some blocks indefinitely when under heavy disk load. A crash or power failure may cause serious file system corruption. Check the default on the system by observing the hw.ata.wc sysctl(8) variable. If IDE write caching is turned off, one can set this read-only variable to 1 in /boot/loader.conf in order to enable it at boot time.

For more information, refer to ata(4).

The SCSI_DELAY kernel configuration option may be used to reduce system boot times. The defaults are fairly high and can be responsible for 15 seconds of delay in the boot process. Reducing it to 5 seconds usually works with modern drives. The kern.cam.scsi_delay boot time tunable should be used. The tunable and kernel configuration option accept values in terms of milliseconds and not seconds.

Meta-data updates are updates to non-content data like inodes or directories. There are two traditional approaches to writing a file system's meta-data back to disk.

Historically, the default behavior was to write out meta-data updates synchronously. If a directory changed, the system waited until the change was actually written to disk. The file data buffers (file contents) were passed through the buffer cache and backed up to disk later on asynchronously. The advantage of this implementation is that it operates safely. If there is a failure during an update, meta-data is always in a consistent state. A file is either created completely or not at all. If the data blocks of a file did not find their way out of the buffer cache onto the disk by the time of the crash, fsck(8) recognizes this and repairs the file system by setting the file length to 0. Additionally, the implementation is clear and simple. The disadvantage is that meta-data changes are slow. For example, rm -r touches all the files in a directory sequentially, but each directory change will be written synchronously to the disk. This includes updates to the directory itself, to the inode table, and possibly to indirect blocks allocated by the file. Similar considerations apply for unrolling large hierarchies using tar -x.

The second approach is to use asynchronous meta-data updates. This is the default for a UFS file system mounted with mount -o async. Since all meta-data updates are also passed through the buffer cache, they will be intermixed with the updates of the file content data. The advantage of this implementation is there is no need to wait until each meta-data update has been written to disk, so all operations which cause huge amounts of meta-data updates work much faster than in the synchronous case. This implementation is still clear and simple, so there is a low risk for bugs creeping into the code. The disadvantage is that there is no guarantee for a consistent state of the file system. If there is a failure during an operation that updated large amounts of meta-data, like a power failure or someone pressing the reset button, the file system will be left in an unpredictable state. There is no opportunity to examine the state of the file system when the system comes up again as the data blocks of a file could already have been written to the disk while the updates of the inode table or the associated directory were not. It is impossible to implement a fsck(8) which is able to clean up the resulting chaos because the necessary information is not available on the disk. If the file system has been damaged beyond repair, the only choice is to reformat it and restore from backup.

The usual solution for this problem is to implement dirty region logging, which is also referred to as journaling. Meta-data updates are still written synchronously, but only into a small region of the disk. Later on, they are moved to their proper location. Because the logging area is a small, contiguous region on the disk, there are no long distances for the disk heads to move, even during heavy operations, so these operations are quicker than synchronous updates. Additionally, the complexity of the implementation is limited, so the risk of bugs being present is low. A disadvantage is that all meta-data is written twice, once into the logging region and once to the proper location, so performance “pessimization” might result. On the other hand, in case of a crash, all pending meta-data operations can be either quickly rolled back or completed from the logging area after the system comes up again, resulting in a fast file system startup.

Kirk McKusick, the developer of Berkeley FFS, solved this problem with Soft Updates. All pending meta-data updates are kept in memory and written out to disk in a sorted sequence (“ordered meta-data updates”). This has the effect that, in case of heavy meta-data operations, later updates to an item “catch” the earlier ones which are still in memory and have not already been written to disk. All operations are generally performed in memory before the update is written to disk and the data blocks are sorted according to their position so that they will not be on the disk ahead of their meta-data. If the system crashes, an implicit “log rewind” causes all operations which were not written to the disk appear as if they never happened. A consistent file system state is maintained that appears to be the one of 30 to 60 seconds earlier. The algorithm used guarantees that all resources in use are marked as such in their blocks and inodes. After a crash, the only resource allocation error that occurs is that resources are marked as “used” which are actually “free”. fsck(8) recognizes this situation, and frees the resources that are no longer used. It is safe to ignore the dirty state of the file system after a crash by forcibly mounting it with mount -f. In order to free resources that may be unused, fsck(8) needs to be run at a later time. This is the idea behind the background fsck(8): at system startup time, only a snapshot of the file system is recorded and fsck(8) is run afterwards. All file systems can then be mounted “dirty”, so the system startup proceeds in multi-user mode. Then, background fsck(8) is scheduled for all file systems where this is required, to free resources that may be unused. File systems that do not use Soft Updates still need the usual foreground fsck(8).

The advantage is that meta-data operations are nearly as fast as asynchronous updates and are faster than logging, which has to write the meta-data twice. The disadvantages are the complexity of the code, a higher memory consumption, and some idiosyncrasies. After a crash, the state of the file system appears to be somewhat “older”. In situations where the standard synchronous approach would have caused some zero-length files to remain after the fsck(8), these files do not exist at all with Soft Updates because neither the meta-data nor the file contents have been written to disk. Disk space is not released until the updates have been written to disk, which may take place some time after running rm(1). This may cause problems when installing large amounts of data on a file system that does not have enough free space to hold all the files twice.