Re: negative dentries wasting ram

David Schwartz
2002-05-24T20:44:09Z

>In glibc 2.3 this will be open("/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive", ), so
>negative dentries won't be useful for glibc locale handling (that
>doesn't mean negative dentries won't be useful for other things, including
>exec?p or searching libraries if $LD_LIBRARY_PATH is used).
>
> Jakub

Web servers tend to look for all kinds of things that don't exist. For
example, if you hit "http://www.mydomain.com/foo" is there a file called
"foo" in the root document directory? Or is "foo" a directory with an
"index.html" file in it?

And what if index files can be "index.html", "index.htm", or "index.cgi"? A
single URL hit can easily involve looking for five files that don't exist
before you find the one that does.

Of course, some web servers have their own internal URL->file mapping
caches. The ideal solution would be to get rid of the negative dentries we
aren't using (much? recently?) when we want to get some more free memory.

DS