write()s and pwrite()s from multiple threads in OSX

[Brandon Black]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 4:55 AM, Jorge Chamorro <jorge at jorgechamorro.com> wrote:
> We've found, in nodejs, that on Mac OSX, when write()ing to a disk file in a tight loop from >= 2 threads, sometimes some write()s seem to fail to write the data but update the fd's file pointer properly, resulting in strings of zeroes ('holes') of data.length length in the file.

Another way to fix this without locking (at least on my mac running
snow leopard) is to set O_APPEND when you open the fd.  I'd agree that
concurrent writes from pthreads in the same process should be atomic
according to POSIX, but in practice I think this is exactly the sort
of area where you're going to find some platforms with bugs.  Most
issues come down to file position update issues.  O_APPEND fixes this
in some cases because it uses different logic for updating the file
position (I think concurrency w/ O_APPEND even works inter-process for
many systems? not sure).  The best way to do concurrent writes is of
course using pwrite() with specific offsets if you're dealing with
fixed-size records, but O_APPEND is a reasonable solution for
logfile-like semantics.