Good point, though I think for a machine averaging even 40mb/sec this only amounts to one 'batch' every 1.2gb receiving an extra sync. Linux recently changed so

Good point, though I think for a machine averaging even 40mb/sec this only amounts to one 'batch' every 1.2gb receiving an extra sync. Linux recently changed so that pdflush doesn't exist at all, when the dirty list fills, a per-device thread is created that sleeps for 5 seconds before starting work, so maybe it's a bit less than 1.2gb.