Hauke Laging wrote: > Hello, > > I just read an interesting hint in the German shell Usenet group > (<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>). As I could not find anything about > that point in your mailing list archive I would like to mention it here. > > The author claims that he achieved a huge performance increase (more than > factor 10) when copying a big amount of small files (1-10 KiB) by sorting > by inode numbers first. This probably reduces the disk access time which > becomes the dominating factor for small files.
disk seeks have mostly missed the computer performance increases over time, and hence why they're increasing being noticed as the bottleneck. However I think mechanical disks will quickly become a thing of the past, with the onset of solid state disks. I've noticed myself a large performance gain in the few filesystems I've tested by sorting by inode, so that the disk head seeks in 1 direction only. One can see this in the findup component of fslint here for example: http://code.google.com/p/fslint/source/browse/tags/2.26/fslint/findup#158 I've also found though that sorting by path is only a little worse. Sorting by md5sum is very bad though :) Pádraig. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
