Conventional wisdom says that appending to a file is atomic, up to a certain write size. That means, for example, that you can have multiple processes write shared a log file and not have the log output crossed. Recently, I was thinking about this “conventional wisdom” and decided to look for some proof. After some Googling, and eventually landed on this StackOverflow question which discusses the question at hand. The accepted answer has a lot of good information, but also uses the words “supposed to be” and “assuming” a little to much to be conclusive.
Not The Wizard
Oz Solomon's Blog
Month: June 2014
Today I’m shutting down one of our oldest servers, hosted on Softlayer. We’ll be transitioning from SoftLayer and Peer1 to our new VPS’s at Linode.
Both SoftLayer and Peer1 have been great to my company, as I have mentioned in the past, but Linode’s all SSD servers have an unbeatable price that just makes our old hardware too expensive to maintain by comparison.
It was a bit of a pain to consolidate 11 servers down to 3 (regretfully, part of the reason I can do this is that traffic isn’t what is used to be), and I learned a thing or two which I may share in a future post. I’m hoping that Linode doesn’t disappoint. Regardless, you can’t complain about the cost saving Moore’s Law dishes out on a regular basis!
© 2025 Not The Wizard
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑