Re: [Ext2-devel] [RFC 0/13] extents and 48bit ext3

Linus Torvalds
2006-06-09T16:55:06Z

On Fri, 9 Jun 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> Just as an example: ext3 _sucks_ in many ways. It has huge inodes that
> take up way too much space in memory.

Btw, I'm not kidding you on this one.

THE NUMBER ONE MEMORY USAGE ON A LOT OF LOADS IS EXT3 INODES IN MEMORY!

And you know what? 2TB files are totally uninteresting to 99.9999% of all
people. Most people find it _much_ more interesting to have hundreds of
thousands of _smaller_ files instead.

So do this:

cat /proc/slabinfo | grep ext3

and be absolutely disgusted and horrified by the size of those inodes
already, and ask yourself whether extending the block size to 48 bits will
help or further hurt one of the biggest problems of ext3 right now?

(And yes, I realize that block numbers are just a small part of it. The
"vfs_inode" is also a real problem - it's got _way_ too many large
list-heads that explode on a 64-bit kernel, for example. Oh, well. My
point is that things like this can make a very real issue _worse_ for all
the people who don't care one whit about it)

Linus