Bug#907429: neverball: Constant fsync calls seriously degrade performance

[Uoti Urpala]

On Tue, 16 Oct 2018 11:32:34 -0400 "Ryan C. Gordon" <icculus at icculus.org> wrote:
> 
> Can someone humor me and make a quick change to Neverball for me?
> 
> In neverball/share/fs_physfs.c, there are three calls to 
> PHYSFS_setBuffer(). Just comment them out and rebuild Neverball with 
> PhysicsFS support and see if the problem goes away on the machine with 
> the slow disk.
> 
> I suspect I know what the problem is (which would be a bug in PhysicsFS, 
> not Neverball, to be clear), but this will confirm it for me.

I tried this and can confirm that removing setBuffer calls avoids the
fsyncs. I verified this with strace too, which should be doable on any
machine (just "strace -o /tmp/output ./neverball", and after playing
check that /tmp/output contains no fsync calls).