Re: Limit hash table size

Andrew Morton
2004-02-06T20:26:27Z

Taneli Vähäkangas <taneli@firmament.fi> wrote:
>
> OTOH, I'd very much
> appreciate if the system didn't act very sluggish during updatedb.

It really helps if your filesystems were laid out by a 2.6 kernel. What
usually happens at present is that you install the distro using a 2.4
kernel and then install 2.6. So all those files under /usr/bin and
/usr/include and everywhere else are laid down by the 2.4 kernel.

Problem is, 2.4's ext2 and ext3 don't have the Orlov allocator, which lays
files out in a much more updatedb-friendly way. I've seen the disk
bandwidth quadruple as updatedb switches from a 2.4-laid-out partition to a
2.6-laid-out partition.