I have a couple of suggestions for making the IPS packaging system much faster. First, introduce a type called dirfile, which is a cpio archive of multiple files in a single directory. These would be files that are always replaced as a group and never otherwise preserved individually. This would also make downloads more efficient by allowing compression to act across a collection of files that contain common strings and to reduce the overhead from a large number of tiny transactions. The problem I see is that there are far too many tiny files, where the overhead of testing each one is so high, it hardly makes it worth finding it in the download cache. The other suggestion is to use only 2 digits in the directory name, instead of 6, for the second level of the download cache. You could get away with 2 if large numbers of small files were aggregated into dirfile's, otherwise, you might need 3. Six is way too many as there is hardly ever more than 1 file in each leaf directory, when optimally, there should be a 100 or so.
George -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
