Comment 2 for bug 710269

I've also run into issues where over-zealously making write() calls leads to more "wobbly" performance because you fill a bunch of buffers, then are forced to write synchronously, then many of them get flushed, then you go back to writing to buffers really quickly, rinse & repeat. I implemented a setting in carbon.conf called MAX_UPDATES_PER_SECOND to address this in my situation, where carbon simply avoids doing writes too quickly, essentially the same effect. However, your solution has the advantage of not requiring an arbitrarily chosen value. I think this is worth adding as an option, I'll add it in the coming 0.9.8 release.