Great article :D The rabbithole actually goes even deeper because buffering on the read side is almost always good, but reads are often way more latency-sensitive than writes. Which leads to the paradox that increasing the buffer size / prefetching more with mmapping can lead to worse performance due to the added latency. And decreasing the buffer size can have the same effect due to issuing more calls, so in order to squeeze in the optimal throughput/latency ratio on reads you have to tune it per workload.... or just try a few different buffer sizes and see which one works better.

Writes are the opposite, they're usually not RAW (read-after-write), they're "fire and forget", so you don't really care about latency, but you do care a whole a lot about your writes actually arriving... again two competing parameters because the more you batch the writes, the faster they are but the bigger chance of a torn write or data loss. And unlike reads, writes are not idempotent on the application level so ideally you'd want some logic to atomically write a meaningful amount of data so it won't get torn, even if it crashes.

Now in practice just about no one actually does any of this but it's a fun thought :D

oh i thought this would be about language and how the brain works, that article sounds more interesting to be honest sorry

This is true even at the CPU cache level so it's probably going to trickle down all the way.

For example Jon G gave a talk at Jane Street about how he had a mysterious performance bug that was later attributed to cores fighting over the same cache line

https://youtu.be/tND-wBBZ8RY?is=624w3YoDN2QYBWuD

There is plenty of fun to be had with write errors and fsync. One example was so called "fsyncgate" where postgresql stumbled upon fsync issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20491965

I think there were some changes in kernel since that but I can't remember what exactly

In any discussion of read, write & sync, I'd want to talk about write amplification (read/modify/write cycles), and also in Linux the sync_file_range syscall which is a useful way to sync part of a file.

I was hoping for something about human reading and writing, but it was about POSIX I/O APIs. Not bad, and I'd go further and point out that `mmap()` is good for reading but not for writing, and why.

> the data may have made it to storage, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s actually visible, because the metadata necessary to reach it might not have been written yet.

The author should clarify here that this fsync wrinkle only affects newly created files, not updates to existing ones.

Yep, reading something doesn't invalidate your caches. Or everyone else's caches.

(2015)