Hi, Our servers have to deal with huge amounts of small files (tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of files IN ONE DIRECTORY).
Currently they use ext3 but I wonder wether this is the prefered FS. I used to be fond of ReiserFS v3 until I got beaten by it not recovering from a partition resizing excercise. Trying to find the answer on the net I found: http://librenix.com/?inode=3296 (Circa 2003, recommends ReiserFS v4, which isn't in the mainstream kernel yet). and http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/388 (Circa 2006, recommends XFS). The later compared handling of large trees (i.e. not necessarily single directory with lots of files in it). Does anyone have good and up to date recommendations for such situation? The files are e-mail messages which are writen, transferred then deleted. I'm also thinking about better ways to handle the files (e.g. putting every few thousands of them in a .zip file to transfer, spreading them across a two-level directory tree etc) but I'd rathertry to keep the changes to the existing software and scripts the the minimum which is required to speed things up. Thanks, --Amos
