>
>Is using forced writes really important for all Microsoft-OS or is
>there an difference between Windows-9x based systems (which are not
>really recommended as servers) and NT-Based systems.
>
>Forced writes can have an huge impact on performance.

I have developed and support an application that is widely used (here in
South Africa) in the retail gasoline industry. We have over 1000 installed
sites, mostly small installations with two or three PCs at each. We run on
anything from MS W95 OSR 2 to XP Professional, including W2K Pro.

Our users are computer illiterate. If a function on the computer takes too
long, they will hard boot the machine. If anything looks like being any
kind of problem, they will hard boot the machine. And when I say hard boot,
I mean they will physically switch off the machine.

The ONLY solution we have found to work reliably is forced writes on. The
problem is WORSE with the newer OSs, because the machines are much more
powerful, and windows has a much larger cache to write to disk - so it
writes less frequently, and you lose more data when it does crash.

We have not found any major impact on speed. At least, no impact that our
users will notice and complain about. Our largest production DB at this
time is over 200 MB.

The decision is yours, obviously. :-) But I would only turn off Forced
Writes under the following conditions :

1. There was a clean power source

2. There was a UPS

3. I could trust the OS

4. I could trust the hardware.

5. I could trust the users.

Regards

Tim


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