<4> post_create: setxatter failed

[Dan Hollis]

On Mon, 23 May 2005, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Mon, May 23, 2005 at 03:02:23AM -0700, Dan Hollis wrote:
> > On Mon, 23 May 2005, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > > > Both.
> > > > Its not just for large directories, reiserfs did much better with many 
> > > > small files too (typical of news and mailservers).
> > > Hmm. that surprises me for htree enabled filesystems (note that if you
> > > create an FS with an old distro and then put 2.6 on it it doesn't use htree)
> > Remember reiserfs was designed from the bottom up to work quickly with 
> > lots of _small files_. So it does what it was designed to do well. That 
> > this happens to be the typical workload of news servers and mailservers 
> > is a happy coincidence.
> yet a design goal leads to a technological implementation, and I'm wondering
> what is a causing factor for ext3 to not be roughly equally fast. ext3 with
> htree should in principle not be bad at lots of small files. at all. There
> is no inherent bias in ext3 towards bigger files (well except when you count
> not having tail merging; tail merging will give you gain in the case of a
> read-mostly lots-of-small-files case)

I think some of this has to do with the fact that ext3 is fundamentally a 
very, very, very old filesystem. Its some of the oldest code still in the 
kernel iirc. Some of the assumptions made in the original design may no 
longer be so relevant over a decade later. ext2 was in use when everyone 
was still on PIO and C/H/S :-) reiserfs by comparison is brand spanking 
new.

I recall hearing something about a tailmerging patch for ext2/3 somewhere. 
What happened to that?

-Dan