Subject: Re: "too many files" in an FFS dir?
To: Jonathan Fuerth <fuerth@jake.capybara.org>
From: Hubert Feyrer <hubert@feyrer.de>
List: tech-kern
Date: 12/16/2000 03:09:38
On Fri, 15 Dec 2000, Jonathan Fuerth wrote:
> Is there any good reason why I should not plan to store all of the
> files in one directory?

Access will suck, as directories are organized in a linear data structure.
(I looked at that code just yesterday). The way to go is to replace the
linear scheme with something like a btree, but that would mean some UFS
changes. I was told that SGI's XFS has such a Btree based directory
structure. UFS (and ext2fs) do not.

Other than that, our UFS itself can take up to 2^31 files per filesystem,
so no real limit there. 


> What I know about berkeley ffs suggests not, but it worries me that
> squid (the http proxy) goes to a great deal of trouble to store small
> (less than 1000 entries) numbers of cached documents in one directory.

See above for a good reason to do so.


 - Hubert

-- 
Hubert Feyrer <hubert@feyrer.de>