[LUNI] in search of filesystem wisdom

[Martin Maney]

On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 02:12:01AM -0500, Brian Sobolak wrote:
> Did you check the handbook?
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/

I don't think so.  I did wander around the freebsd site a bit, but to
be honest I rarely expect good results from such manual searches at
projects that have more than perhaps a dozen pages altogether.  So..

> I found this page, which might be applicable:
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/configtuning-disk.html

Nope, didn't see that - I don't recall that the handbook ever appeared
in any of the attempts I made via Google.  The first item is certainly
of interest, though it's not clear that it addresses the linear search
issue which is the traditional root cause of most performance issues
with overlarge directories.  However, the setting that would be desired
seems to be the default, and in fact I'm hard pressed to imagine when
you'd wish to limit directory caching - surely only under very special
circumstances would that be remotely sane.

> It also mentions the tunefs man page and has extensive detail about
> soft updates, which could be helpful in your situation.

I have to admit I'm baffled by the implication that turning soft
updates on or off (which are you suggesting?) would make the slightest
difference.  Nor do I see anything in tunefs that seems relevant unless
setting the "expected number of files per directory" would have some
good effect on existing directories, uhm, somehow.

I don't doubt that this information is out there somewhere, and thanks
to everyone who's replied.  But it's looking like I may be able to
rework the sorry mess after all -  good ol' hoof and mouth type
solution. :-)

-- 
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when another attack occurs.  -- Bruce Schneier