[tlb]

I was a co-author on one of the contentious papers [0] in log-structured file systems, addressing the question of whether log cleaning could be done during idle times (yes, for any reasonable workload).

There was a surprising amount of drama and personal rivalry. While distracting, knowing that our results would be picked apart motivated us to be really rigorous.

In the end, modern file systems take the best aspects of both. Like the RISC-CISC debate, it's hard to draw a firm conclusion about the two ideas because they're tied up with the quality of implementations, and the optimal answer involves a synthesis of the ideas.

[0] http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/margo/papers/usenix95-clean/pape...