On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 7:01 AM, Andrew Savchenko <birc...@gmail.com> wrote: > > If we are trying to consider all possible cases, some filesystems > may benefit even from compression of very small files (e.g. from > 140 to 100 bytes) due to packing of multiple small files in the > same inode. ReiserFS is a good example, but more may be somewhere > there. >
Btrfs also supports file inlining, so every byte saved on small files does actually help (I believe the data structure that stores the inlined data doesn't have a fixed record size). Then again, btrfs also supports lzo compression and I believe this is fairly widely used, so I'm not sure that the impact of not compressing small files will be felt. I don't think ext4 supports inlining, but I see some discussions of attempts to add it. For VERY small files I would think that overhead would become an issue. Unless we have a bunch of 30-byte man pages I'd think that both simplicity and some potential for utility would lead us to use the best algorithm possible. Rich
