freebsd man page for syncer

SYNCER(4)						   BSD Kernel Interfaces Manual 						 SYNCER(4)

NAME
     syncer -- file system synchronizer kernel process

SYNOPSIS
     syncer

DESCRIPTION
     The syncer kernel process helps protect the integrity of disk volumes by flushing volatile cached file system data to disk.

     The kernel places all vnode(9)'s in a number of queues.  The syncer process works through the queues in a round-robin fashion, usually pro-
     cessing one queue per second.  For each vnode(9) on that queue, the syncer process forces a write out to disk of its dirty buffers.

     The usual delay between the time buffers are dirtied and the time they are synced is controlled by the following sysctl(8) tunable variables:

     Variable	      Default	   Description
     kern.filedelay   30	   time to delay syncing files
     kern.dirdelay    29	   time to delay syncing directories
     kern.metadelay   28	   time to delay syncing metadata

SEE ALSO
     sync(2), fsck(8), sync(8), sysctl(8)

HISTORY
     The syncer process is a descendant of the 'update' command, which appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX, and was usually started by /etc/rc when
     the system went multi-user.  A kernel initiated 'update' process first appeared in FreeBSD 2.0.

BUGS
     It is possible on some systems that a sync(2) occurring simultaneously with a crash may cause file system damage.	See fsck(8).

BSD
								   July 14, 2000							       BSD