Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: give us a hand with arch

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Miles Bader <address@hidden>

    > Um, which `Darkly Hinted Efficiency Improvements' are those?

    > I've done somewhat precise calculations of the potential space savings,
    > and it's quite substantial on some trees, especially those with lots of
    > smallish files.  Time-savings probably would be less noticable, because
    > of the recent inode-state-caching speedups.

Why _don't_ you regard this as a filesystem implementation deficiency,
assuming it is really a problem at all?

It seems to me that a 2-3:1 disk-usage:small-file-size ratio is not
_much_ of a problem, in the big picture, in terms of bucks-per-byte of
storage.  To the degree that it is a problem today, we should expect
it to cease being so within the next couple of years.

On the other hand, 2-3:1 i/o-traffic-size:small-file-size and
kernel-cache-usage:small-fize-size ratios would be very bad news and,
to the extent those things are true, indicate serious filesystem
problems.

When people start saying "small files work so poorly that applications
should implement filesystem-like functionality to handle them
themselves", something has gone very badly wrong either with their
rationale for that, or with the filesystems under consideration.


-t