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[20050125]
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Dirhash: Speeding up handling of large directories
Directories in Unix are usually tables with two columns, file/directory
name and inode-number, the latter of which contains all information
about the file's metadata like size, modification times, pointers to
actual data blocks etc. The problem with large directories is access,
as the table is usually even unsorted. One possible optimisation to
speed things up is using a better data structure for the on-disk data, like
the tree structures used in XFS. An alternative that doesn't require
changing the on-disk data is to maintain hashes in memory to speed
up access, which is what was ported from FreeBSD to NetBSD now with
the name
dirhash.
It is off by default, you can enable it in -current by setting options
"UFS_DIRHASH" in your kernel config. See also David Malone's
overview on UFS/FFS optimisation.
[Tags: dirhash]
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