From owner-freebsd-fs Mon Jul 31 12:33:14 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Received: from xo01-host074.xoom.com (xo01-host074.xoom.com [206.57.66.74]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id EF0DA37BA82 for ; Mon, 31 Jul 2000 12:33:07 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from stevec@nbci.com) Received: (qmail 27020 invoked from network); 31 Jul 2000 19:31:11 -0000 Received: from 209-113.snap.com (HELO ?10.12.0.136?) (206.132.209.113) by xo01-host076.xoom.com with SMTP; 31 Jul 2000 19:31:11 -0000 User-Agent: Microsoft-Outlook-Express-Macintosh-Edition/5.02.2022 Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 12:32:39 -0700 Subject: FFS performance for large directories? From: Steve Carlson To: Message-ID: Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org First off, my apologies in advance if this is not the type of technical question expected in this forum - I checked the charter and archives to get a feel for the theme, but still wasn't sure if this would be inappropriate. -questions was no help, either... I'm trying to figure out at what point I can expect performance issues with an FFS filesystem if I have directories with a massive number of small files or symlinks. As far as I understand it, there are a number of inodes located within a cylinder group, and the inodes for files are ideally placed in the same cylinder group as their parent directory. But if I were to have a massive number of small files or symlinks in a directory, wouldn't I run out of local inodes and thus start to see a performance issue when working in that directory? How can I determine the maximum number of files I should safely place in a directory without my performance suffering? I've been unable to find commentary on this in print or on the web - everything I've read centers only on performance issues when the disk becomes full. Thanks for any help you can offer, Steve -- Steve Carlson NBC Internet To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-fs" in the body of the message