On Friday 15 February 2008 16:16, Aria Bamdad wrote:
>I have a general Linux question that could apply to any platform.
>
>From a performance standpoint, would linux perform better if you
>have two filesystems each with N million files or one file system
>with N*2 million files on it. This would be purely the way the
>file systms are maintained by Linux. Please ignore performance due to
>different drives/channels/partitions, etc.
>
>Put differently, does the performance of a file system degrade as
>the number of files in it increase?
It depends on the type of the filesystem and how it implements its mappings of
files to blocks. I don't know the details of how each filesystem works, so
I'm probably wrong about this, but I suspect that the "reiserfs" type of
filesystem would do better than "ext2", because reiserfs uses a B-tree
internally to avoid linear searches through lists of many files.
The filesystem performance comparisons I've seen tend to think a few thousand
files is "a large number of files", so they're probably not applicable to
your case. Has anyone here done any comparisons with millions of files?
Of course this begs the question: why aren't you spreading those millions of
files across many filesystems? I sure hope you're not putting them all in
one directory. :-)
- MacK.
-----
Edmund R. MacKenty
Software Architect
Rocket Software, Inc.
Newton, MA USA
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