> >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?
Yes. The question is how much, and over what period. Some filesystems degrade more gracefully than others. The size of the files are also a factor. How much? That depends. 8-) ext2 and ext3 were designed as middle-of-the-road filesystems, and do OK for most uses. Xfs tends to do better with smaller #s of large files (given it's SGI heritage, not surprising). Reiserfs does well with large numbers of small files. AFS does well with mixed file sizes, but tends to require more file server systems to get good throughput. Lustre does very well with all sorts of file sizes, but is complex to set up (and is Intel-only at the moment, more's the pity). If you really have a zillion files, one of the distributed filesystems may work better from an operational point of view. That tends to spread out the access load at the expense of some additional network and overhead. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
