Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2006 17:47:15 -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: <BB39466D-51AD-48F5-ACE5-C26F470C9A4E@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <44863ECD.8010104@dudcore.net> References: <44863ECD.8010104@dudcore.net>
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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
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