Re: multiply files in one (was GNU/Linux stance by Richard Stall

Jeremy Fitzhardinge (jeremy@goop.org)
Thu, 01 Apr 1999 00:05:44 -0800 (PST)


On 30-Mar-99 Larry McVoy wrote:
> Figure out exactly how long it takes to read a bunch of little files
> all in their own blocks and contrast that with how long it would take
> to read all those blocks in one large I/O.

Surely this is just a packing and disk layout problem. If you have large
inodes (say, 1 block each), and store the initial portion of the file in the
inode, and lay out inodes to be near their directory entries, you get much the
same effect.

Ext2 can't quite do this because inodes are in fixed locations, but reiserfs
should certainly be able to do this.

It doesn't look like it needs another layer of aggregation at the fs level.

J

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