Re: stat benchmark

[Avi Kivity]

Theodore Tso wrote:
> > Aside from what has already been proposed there is also the
> > readdirplus() route.  Unfortunately the people behind this and related
> > proposals vanished after the last discussions.  I was  hoping they
> > come back with a revised proposal but perhaps not.  Maybe it's time to
> > pick up the ball myself.
> >
> > As a reminder, readdirplus() is an extended readdir() which also
> > returns (a subset of) the stat information for the file at the same
> > time.  The subset part is needed to account for the different
> > information contained in the inodes.  For most applications the subset
> > should be sufficient and therefore all that's needed is a single
> > iteration over the directory.
> >     
>
> I'm not sure this would help in the cold cache case, which is what
> Soeren originally complained about.[1] The problem is whaever
> information the user might need won't be store in the directory, so
> the filesystem would end having to stat the file anyway, incurring a
> disk seek, which was what the user was complaining about.  A
> readdirplus() would save a whole bunch of system calls if the inode
> was already cached, yes, but I'm not sure that's it would be worth the
> effort given how small Linux's system call overhead would be.  But in
> the cold cache case, you end up seeking all over the disk, and the
> only thing you can do is to try to keep the inodes close to each
> other, and to have either readdir() or the caller of readdir() sort
> all of the returned directory entries by inode number to avoid seeking
> all over the disk.
>   

A readdirplus() could sort the inodes according to the filesystem's 
layout, and additionally issue the stats in parallel, so if you have 
multiple spindles you get significant additional speedup.

--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function

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