Re: multiply files in one (was GNU/Linux stance by Richard Stallman)
Arvind Sankar (arvinds@mit.edu)
Mon, 29 Mar 1999 19:35:32 -0500
On Tue, Mar 30, 1999 at 10:05:00AM +1000, Richard Gooch wrote:
> Unless you have a very high compression ratio, why is there so much
> benefit of reading in 10 MBytes of a compressed FS rather than just
> reading in 10 MBytes of buffers on ext2fs?
>
> Note that I'm thinking about reading-ahead the inodes *and* the
> blocks. If you have RAM to burn, then this looks like it should
> work. I'm not thinking in terms of reading ahead a few piddling
> blocks. I'm talking megabytes or dozens of megabytes.
>
> So with two seek operations, you can read-ahead lots of files and lots
> of data.
>
The 10 Mbytes for your files are likely scattered over the disk.
with Larry's tarball, they are probably together.
A file system with good performance on lots of small files is
being written by Reiser. Check
http://devlinux.com/namesys
-- arvind
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