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

Jeremy Jackson
2001-02-20T21:14:21Z

> In article <01022020011905.18944@gimli>,
> Daniel Phillips <phillips@innominate.de> wrote:
> >Earlier this month a runaway installation script decided to mail all its
> >problems to root. After a couple of hours the script aborted, having
> >created 65535 entries in Postfix's maildrop directory. Removing those
> >files took an awfully long time. The problem is that Ext2 does each
> >directory access using a simple, linear search though the entire
> >directory file, resulting in n**2 behaviour to create/delete n files.
> >It's about time we fixed that.

In the case of your script I'm not sure this will help, but:
I've seen /home directories organised like /home/a/adamsonj,
/home/a/arthurtone, /home/b/barrettj, etc.
this way (crude) indexing only costs areas where it's needed,
without kernel modification. (app does it) What other placed would we
need indexing *in* the filesystem?