> I haven't tried to use softdep yet; will 'sync' force a faster update
> or is it by and large ignored?

Sync does appear to do something.  I can see disk activity the first
time I do it.  

On the other hand, I don't know if sync will be enough to keep the
overflow from happening.  In my case with rdist, I couldn't really
repeat the experiment with a sync/update running in the background.

> The issues described don't seem to fall under the realm of acceptable
> performance (I'd certainly be filing a bug with the vendor if I ran into
> such a problem).

Actually, I wasn't 100% sure it was softdeps.  I could have just run
out of space (although I didn't see how.)  The other posting convinced
me that I wasn't alone.

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang Rupprecht    <wolfgang@wsrcc.com>     http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/
DGPS signals via the Internet  http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/gps/dgps-ip.html