Re: multiply files in one (was GNU/Linux stance by Richard Stallman)
Larry McVoy (lm@bitmover.com)
Mon, 29 Mar 1999 15:54:25 -0800
: > 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.
THINK. You guys aren't THINKING. It is very FRUSTRATING.
If you have 200 small files and you have to go get 200 inodes and 200 blocks
to read them in, the inodes and the blocks aren't next to each other, that's
400 disk transactions instead of 1. THINK. PLEASE. This is the third time
I've gone over this point.
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