Because XFS is BETTER (Re: opinion on XFS)

Eray Ozkural erayo at cs.bilkent.edu.tr
Fri May 10 18:25:24 PDT 2002


On Friday 10 May 2002 17:33, Mark Hahn wrote:
> > That's really an advantage. Space utilization is in fact quite important
> > for contemporary applications on UNIX. Especially since we tend to have
> > so many small files such as sources, etc. nowadays. The savings can be
> > significant.
>
> odd how; I would state the exact opposite: space utilization is becoming
> pointless because disk is embarassingly cheap, and files are getting
> bigger.  I also do not see any non-mistake large directories (where
> large means over say, 4k files.)  at least not in the scientific
> computing arena - mail and news servers are naturally quite a lot
> different in how they use files.

Well I think the number of files is going up as well, and I wasn't referring 
to how cheap drives are :) Since there is a heap of free software, you tend 
to have lots of those small files on your drive. Not on the *nodes*, 
presumably, so you're right in a sense. It's still an advantage to have a 
filesystem that has good space utilization though, especially if it does not 
have any serious drawbacks. I'd made a measurement on a pretty full debian 
system, and IIRC there were tons of files with size <4K, excluding sources.

Thanks,

-- 
Eray Ozkural (exa) <erayo at cs.bilkent.edu.tr>
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo  Malfunction: http://mp3.com/ariza
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