reading loads of little XML files from disk [was Re: Ottawa - kernel hackers ...]

[Mark McLoughlin <mark skynet ie>]

Hey,
	I'd forgotten this was being discussed over here. I did a little work
on making it possible to seriously reduce the number of individual files
used ... for anyone who's interested:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gconf-list/2003-July/msg00001.html

	Hopefully, now we can do some real benchmarks on just how much of an
impact all these little files are ...

Good Luck,
Mark.

On Mon, 2003-07-07 at 14:37, Michael Meeks wrote:
> Hi Alan,
> 
> On Fri, 2003-06-27 at 20:48, Alan Cox wrote:
> > Curiouser and curiouser (so is mine, although a generic -ac kernel)
> 
> 	Are you serious that on your system; from cold you get a sub 1 second
> time for: time find ~/.gconf -name '*.xml' -exec cat {} > /dev/null \; -
> I'm assuming of course that you've used a fair number of Gnome apps -
> and thus that there are a good number of tiny scattered files in
> ~/.gconf.
> 
> 	Either way - the performance is directly related to seek time, and
> almost nothing to do with read time. It's interesting that my hdparm
> measures read time, but not avg./worst case seek times - is there a good
> way for people to measure that easily - so we can correlate it with
> their times ?
> 
> 	Hmm,
> 
> 		Michael.