lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2008]   [Apr]   [28]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectRe: stat benchmark
Theodore Tso wrote:
>> Aside from what has already been proposed there is also the
>> readdirplus() route. Unfortunately the people behind this and related
>> proposals vanished after the last discussions. I was hoping they
>> come back with a revised proposal but perhaps not. Maybe it's time to
>> pick up the ball myself.
>>
>> As a reminder, readdirplus() is an extended readdir() which also
>> returns (a subset of) the stat information for the file at the same
>> time. The subset part is needed to account for the different
>> information contained in the inodes. For most applications the subset
>> should be sufficient and therefore all that's needed is a single
>> iteration over the directory.
>>
>
> I'm not sure this would help in the cold cache case, which is what
> Soeren originally complained about.[1] The problem is whaever
> information the user might need won't be store in the directory, so
> the filesystem would end having to stat the file anyway, incurring a
> disk seek, which was what the user was complaining about. A
> readdirplus() would save a whole bunch of system calls if the inode
> was already cached, yes, but I'm not sure that's it would be worth the
> effort given how small Linux's system call overhead would be. But in
> the cold cache case, you end up seeking all over the disk, and the
> only thing you can do is to try to keep the inodes close to each
> other, and to have either readdir() or the caller of readdir() sort
> all of the returned directory entries by inode number to avoid seeking
> all over the disk.
>

A readdirplus() could sort the inodes according to the filesystem's
layout, and additionally issue the stats in parallel, so if you have
multiple spindles you get significant additional speedup.

--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function



\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2008-04-28 14:01    [W:0.050 / U:1.716 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site