Technical issues on Linux

[worley at world.std.com (Dale R Worley)]

   From: Rich Braun <richb at pioneer.ci.net>

   If syslogd's log files get bigger than a few megabytes, the
   overhead of this fsync() on a busy system causes major CPU
   thrashing.

Though it seems to this naive person that the overhead of the fsync
should be limited to the number of disk blocks that have been modified
by syslogd since the last time it did an fsync.  Is the kernel keeping
the data structures to allow fsync to be implemented efficiently?

Dale