Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 2 Jun 1999 04:18:07 -0400 (EDT) | From | Alexander Viro <> | Subject | Re: directory ops? |
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On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Larry McVoy wrote:
> I was chatting with tchrist (the perl guy) today and he mentioned that > BSD does a better job of very large directory handling than Linux. The > suggested test was to create a directory with 10,000 files in it and > compare > > ls -l > ls -l first_file > ls -l middle_file > ls -l last_file > > under both BSD and Linux. > > Has anyone done this? If this is an area where we need some work, I'll > add the appropriate test to lmbench.
Under which filesystem? Aside of one optimization we might do and BSD does for some filesystems (memorizing last lookup position for a while and restarting lookup from that place) I'ld say that claim is pure BS. ->readdir() in *BSD doesn't populate per-fs directory caches, so he might have a point with 2.0.x - there we used to do stupid things like that (with dcache) and ls -l on large directory might cause massive dcache sweep. Doesn't happen with 2.2/2.3.
Adding the test will not hurt, indeed. Doing it accurately might be tricky, though. E.g. ls -l sorts the entries. In userspace. So you'll have to factor that out - I doubt that GNU ls does bogosort, but...
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