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Ramblings
Personal blog · flamingspork.com/blogsecuritysystems
Ramblings is a personal blog at flamingspork.com about security and systems. Since 2011, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “Libeatmydata: disable fsync and speed up your tests”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog mainly for the libeatmydata project, which disables fsync for speed, and for the 'eat my data' talk on disk and filesystem safety. Some posts cover MySQL code size.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Libeatmydata: disable fsync and speed up your tests6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2015-08-28
- Use `nproc` and not grep /proc/cpuinfo2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-11-25
What Hacker News says?
I gave the suggestion on Twitter, but probably worth mentioning here too as people here might not be aware of it. https://www.flamingspork.com/projects/libeatmydata/ libeatmydata shouldn't be used in production environments, generally speaking, as it biases for speed over safety (lib-eat-my-data), by disabling fsync, and associated commands for the running process under it. Disabling those commands results in less I…
Comment linking /projects/libeatmydata/
on “Inserting a billion rows in SQLite under a minute”Submitted Use `nproc` and not grep /proc/cpuinfo as a story · 105 points
HN discussionRelated: https://www.flamingspork.com/projects/libeatmydata/
Comment linking /projects/libeatmydata/
on “Why Google Pixel lags 10x more than Moto Z”Submitted Gaining control of BMC from the host processor as a story · 52 points
HN discussionWell I used btrfs as a root filesystem for quite a while, until I realized it was pig slow for sync() -- I mean, it would take AGES to do and apt-get upgrade for example. I ended up having to do some tasks using 'eatmydata' [0] to make it all better, risking filesystem corruption in trade for speed. Also, at the time, there was no functioning fsck. So I moved back safely to ext4 and never looked back! [0]: https://w…
Comment linking /projects/libeatmydata/
on “Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL”Submitted Updating ME Firmware on a Lenovo Without Windows as a story · 6 points
HN discussionRunning the RBDMS with `eatmydata` ( https://www.flamingspork.com/projects/libeatmydata/ ) can significantly speed up tests in my experience. All of you're data is gone as soon as the process exits, but that doesn't matter for tests.
Comment linking /projects/libeatmydata/
on “SQL Is No Excuse to Avoid DevOps”Submitted Libeatmydata: disable fsync and speed up your tests as a story · 3 points
HN discussionEdward Screven addresses this point in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzCpd4j72jA - Oracle sees MySQL users as a distinct group of customers from the Oracle Database - 5 years on, the engineering team on MySQL is 2x what it was when acquired. By a simple metric (LoC), MySQL 5.6 has a larger delta than any previous release: https://www.flamingspork.com/blog/2013/03/05/mysql-code-size... Edit: See also th…
Comment linking /blog/2013/03/05/mysql-code-size/
on “MySQL 5.7.6 is out”Submitted Libeatmydata – disable fsync and SAVE as a story · 1 points
HN discussionPaint me unimpressed. "eat my Data" was a way, way better and deeper presentation: http://www.oscon.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/3172 Get the presentation here: http://flamingspork.com/talks/2007/06/eat_my_data.odp
Comment linking /talks/2007/06/eat_my_data.odp
on “What Every Data Programmer Needs to Know About Disks”Submitted MariaDB and Trademarks, and advice for your project as a story · 1 points
HN discussionNo, because XFS doesn't eat your data if you're using decent hardware with decent applications. See http://flamingspork.com/talks/2007/06/eat_my_data.odp It's probably not the best choice for a basic desktop without UPS, though, or a laptop.
Comment linking /talks/2007/06/eat_my_data.odp
on “XFS, ext and per-inode mutexes”Submitted On Telstra tracking NextG HTTP requests as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI only use `nproc` and see it used in other containers as well, ie `bundle install -j $(nproc)`. This honors cpu assignment and provides the functionality you're seeking. Whether or not random application software uses nproc if available, idk > Print the number of processing units available to the current process, which may be less than the number of online processors. If this information is not accessible, then pri…
Comment linking /blog/2020/11/25/why-you-should-use-nproc-and-not-grep-proc-cpuinfo/
on “Go, Containers, and the Linux Scheduler”On a more generic front, there's always libeatmydata which forcibly disables fsync. I've used it in the past for doing, eg, faster database restores. Run mysqld under it, do the restore, manually force a sync, shut down MySQL, restart and then carry out validation activities. Usually dramatically speeds up bringing up a replica. https://www.flamingspork.com/projects/libeatmydata/
Comment linking /projects/libeatmydata/
on “Optimizing Postgres's autovacuum for high-churn tables”
