On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 2:09 PM, Ludwig Isaac Lim <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi: > > We're try to implement a large file server. Since there are so many > files. I'm thinking of > splitting the files across multiple subdirectories. What do you think in a > good number of files > per directory? Many thanks.
as many as you want as long as you know how to fine tune your filesystem... first.. you have to look how linux VFS architecture looks like... there are three important caches in VFS: 1. inode cache 2. directory cache 3. buffer cache these hash searching algorithm caches stored in memory to avoid disk i/o lookup to improve speed... ill let you do the research about VFS and just take note that directory caching only cache directories 15 characters long... meaning like this directory /dir/less/15chr must be less or equal to 15 characters long... as always.. cache needs a lot of physical memory in your system to improve things... second.. the number of files you can store in your filesystem depends on the number of inodes that have been allocated during the creation of your filesystem.. every file correspond one inode... and third... you have to take advantage the "dir_index" feature of ext2/ext3 filesystem so that it uses the hash b-tree lookup to speed up the file access in a single directory... http://lwn.net/Articles/11481/ fooler. _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List http://lists.linux.org.ph/mailman/listinfo/plug Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
