softupdates recommendation

["Sancho2k.net Lists" <lists@sancho2k.net>]

I was hoping to get a group concensus on the use of softupdates.

The FAQ says that "Soft Updates are still in development as a whole" but 
  they do sound mighty appealing.

Are softupdates used my many without a great danger relating to the 
problems discussed?  Can I consider it safe to implement them on 
filesystems used heavily with a lot of disk activity to generally speed 
the system up?

One area that I wanted to try to improve (without forking out $$$ for 
scsi host adaptor and disks) was the performance of the system during 
anoncvs updates. My vmstat output looks like this during it:

procs   memory        page                    disks     faults     cpu
  r b w    avm    fre   flt  re  pi  po  fr  sr wd0 cd0   in    sy   cs 
us sy id
  1 7 0 111908 484404   215   0   0   0   0   0   8   0  243   522   25 
  2  1 98
  0 7 0 111912 484400   279   0   0   0   0   0  59   0  296   569   84 
  1  1 98
  0 7 0 111912 484400   709   0   0   0   0   0  27   0  261   821   53 
  2  2 96

I understand that the 7 in the second column indicates that my disk is 
blocking and is the bottleneck. Will softupdates drastically improve 
this? (ATA 66 7200 IDE disk.)

TIA for the responses,

DS