Re: removing an ext2fs file forces disk activity

[Ludovic Courtès]

> > I just found out that
> > 
> > while touch /tmp/foo; do rm /tmp/foo; done
> > 
> > causes a lot of disk activity.  Further tests showed that the disk is
> > activated for each rm.  Is this a hard requirement?  In Linux, the loop
> > above does not cause any disk activity (except at the beginning and
> > maybe at the end), it seems to be done completely in the cache.
> 
> I found out another thing a few days ago.

I noticed another one two. :) It's actually more a performance issue. For
instance, when unpacking a tarball, "ps aux | head" shows that the ext2fs
server starts consuming most of the CPU time (more than 30% on my 350MHz proc
machine). This happens also whith the pflocal server sometimes.

This kind of observation is quite normal I guess, due to the extensive use of
RPCs and so on, but are there still some optimizations that could be
implemented in order to reduce CPU consumption?

Cheers,
Ludovic.