Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2006 15:35:41 -0400 From: Charles Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> To: dud@dudcore.net Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Heavy creation and deletion of symlinks Message-ID: <C899EC58-0737-43E4-9B00-85E6E2F317A8@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <44863ECD.8010104@dudcore.net> References: <44863ECD.8010104@dudcore.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
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
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?C899EC58-0737-43E4-9B00-85E6E2F317A8>