I thought linear was O(n)? What are some more modern file systems
that speed this up, and how do they do it? Do they use a hash for
the structure of the directory?
Regards,
Andy Huhn
http://www.stormwarn.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Uwe Ohse [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Saturday, March 18, 2000 5:41 AM
> To: David E. Weekly
> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: Maildir Scalability Question
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 18, 2000 at 02:06:11AM -0800, David E. Weekly wrote:
>
> > my Maildir has 5086 messages in it to be precise. Recently (i.e., in the
> > last 500 messages or so) retreiving mail has become *painfully* slow.
> > Looking at "top," I find that imapd is choking the CPU, taking
> 97% of the
> > CPU just to open a mail message. Huh?
>
> > Wasn't a Maildir supposed to solve this?
>
> No. Maildir solved other problems which i consider far worse.
>
> Maildir is the way to receive messages ("inbox"), not the way to
> store them.
>
> > Or is this a fundamental filesysem problem (I'm using ext2fs)? What
>
> this is an ext2fs problem. Well, ext2 shares it with many other file
> systems, but modern filesystems are smarter.
> Every access to a file in ext2 has to scan about 50% of the directory -
> it's a linear search. (O(n^2))
>
> Regards, Uwe
>
