Date: Sun, 5 May 2002 04:48:27 -0400 From: utsl@quic.net To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com>, Scott Hess <scott@avantgo.com>, "Vladimir B. Grebenschikov" <vova@sw.ru>, fs@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Filesystem Message-ID: <20020505084827.GA3688@quic.net> In-Reply-To: <3CD3FB02.3EC1DA29@mindspring.com> References: <200205040019.UAA13780@illustrious.cnchost.com> <3CD32F43.327CDA46@mindspring.com> <20020504041936.GA19646@quic.net> <3CD3FB02.3EC1DA29@mindspring.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sat, May 04, 2002 at 08:15:14AM -0700, Terry Lambert wrote: > utsl@quic.net wrote: > > [ ... linear directory search times on the majority of systems ... ] > I wasn't really trying to exhasutively list all the reasons that > it was bad to put a bunch of files in a large directory. There > are an incredibly large number of reasons for it to be bad, and > I have better things to do than spending the rest of time pointing > out impedence mismatches in algorithms. 8-). Yup. I could think of quite a few more, myself. For most people, one or two should be sufficient. > My take on an application that doesn't scale is that "fixing" the > application by changing the behaviour of the underlying system is > just propping up bad code. Bad code deserves to lose. So if > someone wrote an application like that, it's just as well that the > programmer who failed to consider scaling issues lose out to the > programmer who considered them. After all, it's very likely that > the failure to consider scaling issues is more of an "all or nothing" > thing, and that the failure to consider one means that solving it in > the OS will just expose the next one. There's really no way you > can make the OS behave perfectly for all applications. At some > point, applications programmers will have to learn how to program, > or all bets are off. Yes. Most people that supported the application I described would have liked to catch the application programmers in a dark alley. People who put 100,000 files in a single directory deserve what happens to them, IMHO. However, it is nice to have the tools to do things right. Given how common this particulary problem seems to be, I think a library might be a good idea. I may write one, I'm working on an application now that needs to be able to scale to at least 1M files. :( ---Nathan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-fs" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20020505084827.GA3688>