Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: GNU/Linux stance by Richard Stallman | Date | Sat, 27 Mar 1999 18:22:55 -0800 | From | Larry McVoy <> |
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: That's true for current ext2fs implementations, but people have occasionally : suggested that for small files (64 bytes or less), the data should be : stored in the inode itself. If that ever comes to pass, then the 10 byte : version will save disk space.
A while back when I was doing more file system stuff, I looked hard at this area and gathered up stats from a bunch of Sun's on Sun's mountain view campus.
This data is from '93 so I'm not positive that it is still accurate but I'll bet long odds things haven't changed that much.
The conclusion that I came to as a result of looking at this (and a lot more) data was that the wrong thing to do is worry about single files. What you want to do is to figure out how to put mutiple files in one "file" - essentially make tar be a part of the file system where you put related files in the same "tarball". Then when you access any file - metadata or data - then you schlep in the entire tarball and explode it in memory. Food for thought.
Here's the data, this is distribution of files as a function of size. It's very important to note that this was //**//NOT//**// an analysis of on disk data sizes - I was looking at the set of files which were actually in memory.
Size Count Log2 histogram 1 ( 48) ###### 2 ( 294) ######### 4 ( 430) ######### 8 ( 105) ####### 16 ( 922) ########## 32 ( 539) ########## 64 ( 792) ########## 128 (1454) ########### 256 (1637) ########### 512 (2024) ########### 1K (3421) ############ 2K (2978) ############ 4K (3268) ############ 8K (3298) ############ 16K (3908) ############ 32K (6824) ############# 64K (2934) ############ 128K (2347) ############ 256K (1186) ########### 512K ( 950) ########## 1M ( 850) ########## 2M ( 617) ########## 4M ( 155) ######## 8M ( 59) ###### 16M ( 65) ####### 32M ( 141) ######## 64M ( 5) ### 128M ( 5) ### 256M ( 3) ## 41259
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