Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!newshost.telstra.net!act.news.telstra.net!psgrain!newsfeed.internetmci.com!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!zrz.TU-Berlin.DE!cs.tu-berlin.de!informatik.uni-bremen.de!nordwest.pop.de!uniol!uni-erlangen.de!news.tu-chemnitz.de!irz401!uriah.heep!not-for-mail From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Poor performance with INN and FreeBSD. Date: 26 Feb 1996 01:46:00 +0100 Organization: Private FreeBSD site, Dresden. Lines: 30 Distribution: inet Message-ID: <4gqvs8$7u@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <311F8C62.4BC4@pluto.njcc.com> <4gf2p0$209@fozzie.sun3.iaf.nl> <4gij7n$pmm@uriah.heep.sax.de> <4go23v$8hp@fozzie.sun3.iaf.nl> NNTP-Posting-Host: uriah.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Geert Bosch <geert@fozzie.sun3.iaf.nl> wrote: >J Wunsch (j@uriah.heep.sax.de) wrote: >: BSD uses a filesystem with linear directories, but the directory >: contains just an pointer to the i-node information (unlike e.g. OS/2, >: where the directory contains the equivalent of an i-node itself). >But if you have to look for a certain filename you'd still have to >do a lineair search which is what is causing the large overhead when >accessing news articles in a large directory. ``large'' overhead is certainly an overstatement, unless you're going to put your news server on a 386sx/16. Searching is a mostly computing-intensive operation once you've got the disk blocks in memory. The file system buffer cache ensures the latter. CPU cycles are rather cheap these days, compared to disk transfers. >Since I don't know much about filesystems, my proposal might very well >be completely stupid or not applicable to FreeBSD. Since I'm not afraid >to learn, please tell me why. I doubt anybody will be bothered enough to rewrite a file system from scratch just for news servers. :) (Almost everything else doesn't have more than a few hundred entries per directory.) -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)