Re: problems with large directories - not only ext2

Matthew Kirkwood (weejock@ferret.lmh.ox.ac.uk)
Mon, 9 Aug 1999 22:52:18 +0100 (GMT)


On Sat, 7 Aug 1999, Marc Lehmann wrote:

> Linux gets extremely slow on operations like "ls", when done on large
> directories (1000+ files). For example, when listing a few large news
> directories I can watch how my window manager re-draws its windows,
> and typing in commands is awkward (but possible).

> Until now I thought this was a limitation of ext2. But just now I ls
> -lR a cd with large directories, and the result was just the same.

Actually, it is just an fs-specific thing. It happens to be specific to
almost most of the common) filesystems that Linux supports, that's all :)

Has Reiser hopes to get a reiserfs patch against 2.3 out sometime this
week (a new 2.2 patch is available already). Perhaps if you try that you
may not see such misbehaviour.

I suspect that you see it more with the dcache because it will incur fewer
blocking operations during the readdir/stat syscalls. 2.3 has a lot less
filesystem operation serialised, so you may see significant improvements
there.

Matthew.

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