xfs
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: is xfs good if I have millions of files and thousands of hardlinks?

To: Tomasz Chmielewski <mangoo@xxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: is xfs good if I have millions of files and thousands of hardlinks?
From: Mark Goodwin <markgw@xxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2008 09:30:11 +1100
Cc: xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx
In-reply-to: <47BADF75.2070004@wpkg.org>
Organization: SGI Engineering
References: <47BADF75.2070004@wpkg.org>
Reply-to: markgw@xxxxxxx
Sender: xfs-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxx
User-agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.14 (Windows/20071210)


Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:
I have a ext3 filesystem with almost 200 million files (1.2 TB fs, ~65% full); most of the files are hardlinked multiple times, some of them are hardlinked thousands of times.

I described my problem yesterday on linux-fsdev list:

http://marc.info/?t=120333985100003

quite a long discussion there .. I haven't read it .. but some comments below anyway ..

In general, because new files and hardlinks are being added all the time and the old ones are being removed, this leads to a very, very poor performance.

When I want to remove a lot of directories/files (which will be hardlinks, mostly), I see disk write speed is down to
50 kB/s - 200 kB/s (fifty - two hundred kilobytes/s) - this is the "bandwidth" used during the deletion.



Also, the filesystem is very fragmented ("dd if=/dev/zero of=some_file bs=64k" writes only about 1 MB/s).


Will xfs handle a large number of files, including lots of hardlinks, any better than ext3?

defragmenting by copying from the ext3 filesystem to a new filesystem should help, for a while at least. Whether xfs would have an on-going performance problem compared to ext3 depends on your usage patterns .. does "all the time" mean you are continuously adding new files and links and removing files at a high rate/second? Are multiple threads doing this? Are all the files the same size? Block-size been tuned?

-- Mark



<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>