>Mostly it's a format of on-disk representation. IOW, introduce your
>cow-orker to clue-by-4 - keeping a lot of files in on directory is _BAD_
>idea.
Not really. He needs to keep an amount of data on disk.
The organization shouldn't matter that much for performance. If it
does anyway it means we have a performance problem, or at least
a system unfit for that special case.
Keeping lots of files in a directory is surely a bad idea with ext2.
That don't mean the idea is bad, just that ext2 don't fit that purpose
with its sequential scans.
Filesystems with b-tree directories have O(log n) performance for
directory
lookup. An "rm *" which gets O(n^2) complexity in ext2 gets O(n log n)
which is a lot better. Try reiserfs (or hpfs). Looking up
or deleting lots of files isn't a problem with that approach.
Helge Hafting
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