Berkeley CSUA MOTD:Entry 30838
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2025/05/24 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
5/24    

2004/6/16 [Computer/SW/SpamAssassin, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:30838 Activity:very high
6/16    It's not in any way against CSUA policy to have procmail check
        your quota each time it runs, is it?
        \_ Why would it be?
           \_ I think the quota file might be a bit of a chokepoint for the
              filesystem; probably bad if everybody were to do it.  Perhaps
              try du -d1 instead?
              \_ du -d1 is way more impact than quota.  -tom
              \_ Yeah, wow.  Use your head: with quotas on every filesystem
                 op results in a quota check; how can it be high overhead?
                 \_ Please correct me if/where I'm wrong: quota files are
                    maintained at the root of each file system, and,
                    empirically, I've noticed that quota results are cached:
                     quota -v; rm reallyBigFile; quota -v; sleep; quota -v;
                    I imagine this cache resides at the FS root as well, so
                    hundreds of users x hundreds of spams = 1000s of writes
                    to the quota cache = possibly slow disk access.
                    Different cases possible with softupdates and/or
                    kernel-based memory cache.
                    \_ Quotas are kept in memory, in the kernel; you can
                       access them with the quotactl system call.  There
                       are quota files at the root of each filesystem too,
                       but they're only used to initialize the kernel's
                       quota information at boot time.

                       Since it's all stored in memory, updating the quota
                       information when you create and remove files is
                       trivial.  You only see delays because soft updates
                       is delaying the actual writes to your files, and thus
                       delaying the quota updates too -- on systems without
                       soft updates, quotas update instantly.  --mconst
                    \_ you could have verified this yourself by using the
                       "time" command to see that du -d1 takes an order of
                       magnitude longer than quota, instead of sounding off
                       like a moron.  -tom
                       \_ great way to encourage discussion.  you rock!
                    \_ That suggests that although writing/deleting lots of
                       spam could load the system (which we already know)
                       lots of people reading the quota file will probably
                       not be a big load, or at least not any worse than
                       reading a file of spam-filtering rules.
        \_ depends on your personality
        \_ I'll take this discussion as "No, it's not against policy".
           \_ you can take it that way (i would) but just be sure you don't
              end up a hoser; that's the policy you need to worry about
              here. - erikk
2025/05/24 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
5/24    

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