Re: [rfc] Near-constant time directory index for Ext2

H. Peter Anvin
2001-02-22T02:41:59Z

Andreas Dilger wrote:
>
> Basically (IMHO) we will not really get any noticable benefit with 1 level
> index blocks for a 1k filesystem - my estimates at least are that the break
> even point is about 5k files. We _should_ be OK with 780k files in a single
> directory for a while.
>

I've had a news server with 2000000 files in one directory. Such a
filesystem is likely to use small blocks, too, because each file is
generally small.

This is an important connection: filesystems which have lots and lots of
small files will have large directories and small block sizes.

-hpa

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