Working with large directories

Chris Adams cmadams at hiwaay.net
Sat Mar 17 06:21:17 UTC 2012


Once upon a time, fred smith <fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us> said:
> I know that on (much) older systems, large directories were inherently
> slow to traverse. I guess I shouldn't assume that is still the case.

Old systems also much less RAM.  I made a directory with a similar
number of files, and the space on disk for the directory is 8MB.  When
system RAM is measure in MB, you're using a large portion of it just to
sort a list that size (possibly swapping or tossing cached buffers).
When you have GB of RAM, what's 8MB?
-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.


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