Comment 138 for bug 317781

@Theodore,

> Well, that's not how I would describe it, although I admit in practice it has
> that effect. What's happening is that the journal is still being committed
> every 5 seconds, but dirty pages in the page cache do not get flushed out if
> they don't have a block allocation assigned to them.

I think everyone understands why it's a bad idea to write data pages immediately (thanks for your detailed and clear explanations). But why can't the metadata writes be delayed as well? Why do they have to be written every five seconds instead of much later, whenever the data happens to get written?