Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Some issues

[Florian Weimer]

* Andrew Suffield:

>> > This is essentially wrong on all the interesting filesystems. It's
>> > equivalent on most of them, and a little slower to use one large file
>> > on NTFS and HFS+.
>> 
>> Huh?  What about seek overhead?
>
> What seek overhead? There is no strong relationship between "being in
> the same file" and "being in the same region of the disk",

Wrong, modern file systems try to maintain that relationship.

> and no strong repulsion between "being in different files" and
> "being in the same region of the disk". These things are mostly
> related to creation pattern, not file membership.

While there are some file systems which group files according to the
directory they are stored in them, UNIX file systems can hardly do
this (and tla's hard links would break it anyway).

You can compensate for part of this problem if you sort directory
entries by inode number before accessing them, but it's still much
worse than just reading a file sequentially.

> HFS+ goes further

HFS+ doesn't support hard links, so it's certainly not the file system
of choice for tla. 8-)

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