Re: Heavy creation and deletion of symlinks
On Jun 6, 2006, at 10:49 PM, Dag Rune Sneeggen wrote: So my question is; how does such activity affect the general health and operation of FreeBSD? It doesn't, really. The OS will happily deference the symlinks you create as needed. Also, the health of the harddrive(s) which will most likely be SATA disks. Decent-quality disk drives shouldn't have any problems operating under continuous load, but some low-end desktop drives aren't rated for continuous operation. You should probably look into setting up a RAID-1, -10, or -5 configuration. It is my understanding that symlinks only affects the file allocation table, and not the physical data blocks? This would mean that the impact isn't so terrible, as the changes will be contained to a relatively small part of the beginning of the disk, correct? No, that is not correct. The FFS doesn't have a single file allocation table, it has inodes scattered throughout the various cylinder groups, which span the entire disk surface. Inodes contain some metadata which corresponds to portions of the MS-DOS FAT, and some systems implement small symlinks (aka fast symlinks) within the inode entry, but longer symlinks are stored in the data blocks in a fashion similar to keeping text data in a normal file. -- -Chuck ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Heavy creation and deletion of symlinks
On Jun 6, 2006, at 10:49 PM, Dag Rune Sneeggen wrote: So my question is; how does such activity affect the general health and operation of FreeBSD? It doesn't, really. The OS will happily deference the symlinks you create as needed. Also, the health of the harddrive(s) which will most likely be SATA disks. Decent-quality disk drives shouldn't have any problems operating under continuous load, but some low-end desktop drives aren't rated for continuous operation. You should probably look into setting up a RAID-1, -10, or -5 configuration. It is my understanding that symlinks only affects the file allocation table, and not the physical data blocks? This would mean that the impact isn't so terrible, as the changes will be contained to a relatively small part of the beginning of the disk, correct? No, that is not correct. The FFS doesn't have a single file allocation table, it has inodes scattered throughout the various cylinder groups, which will span the entire disk. Inodes contain some metadata which corresponds to aspects of the MS-DOS FAT. Some Unix systems utilize fast symlinks if the symlink is small enough (less than 50 characters or so), which are kept in the inode; otherwise, for longer symlinks, those are stored as data in sectors just like a normal file would be. -- -Chuck ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Heavy creation and deletion of symlinks
I am currently planning an FTP-based service which requires a custom application to run which will create hundreds (if not thousands) of symlinks in various directories per hour. There will probably also be a cronjob running to delete symlinks periodically. The main purpose of the server will be medium to heavy traffic FTP serving. So my question is; how does such activity affect the general health and operation of FreeBSD? Also, the health of the harddrive(s) which will most likely be SATA disks. It is my understanding that symlinks only affects the file allocation table, and not the physical data blocks? This would mean that the impact isn't so terrible, as the changes will be contained to a relatively small part of the beginning of the disk, correct? -- Dag Rune Sneeggen Romolslia 23B 7029 Trondheim NORWAY -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
