Re: multiply files in one (was GNU/Linux stance by Richard Stallman)
Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au)
Tue, 30 Mar 1999 09:50:53 +1000
Larry McVoy writes:
> : > Please show me the design of a file system which can bring in multiple
> : > small files with a single seek and read. When you get done, you'll be
> : > looking at what I described.
> :
> : Seek and read which files? If you want anything but all files, you're
> : probably out of lock. Again, you will have to seek if any of the
> : files are fragmented (which is the case with most fs).
>
> Your still missing the performance implications. In many, many typical
> cases (and this will become more and more true as memory gets cheaper),
> it would be far faster to eat the whole tarball and explode it into a
> bunch of in memory files even to get just a few of the files. Work
> through the math - if each file costs you a seek, you only need to get
> to 2-3 files before it would be faster to get 'em all.
Hm. But do we need a special FS for this? In theory, isn't this
covered by a sufficiently aggressive read-ahead mechanism at the block
layer and in the drive itself? If the HDD reads in a whole sector into
its cache, that will contain a fair number of small files.
Regards,
Richard....
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