eatmydata - 131-2 main

This package contains a small LD_PRELOAD library (libeatmydata) and a couple
of helper utilities designed to transparently disable fsync and friends (like
open(O_SYNC)). This has two side-effects: making software that writes data
safely to disk a lot quicker and making this software no longer crash safe.
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You will find eatmydata useful if particular software calls fsync(), sync()
etc. frequently but the data it stores is not that valuable to you and you may
afford losing it in case of system crash. Data-to-disk synchronization calls
are typically very slow on modern file systems and their extensive usage might
slow down software significantly. It does not make sense to accept such a hit
in performance if data being manipulated is not very important.
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On the other hand, do not use eatmydata when you care about what software
stores or it manipulates important components of your system. The library is
called libEAT-MY-DATA for a reason.