Re: Why migrate to new backend format

[seth vidal <skvidal phy duke edu>]

On Mon, 2003-10-06 at 09:23, Michael Meeks wrote:
> Hi Alex,
> 
> On Mon, 2003-10-06 at 08:31, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > On Mon, 2003-10-06 at 01:04, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > > So the fewer-files patch is the only immediate reason to change.
> > 
> > And why is using fewer files important?
> 
> 	Primarily seek time; secondarily slack file space I guess.
> 
> 	Seek time: I have ~350 .xml files in my ~/.gconfd, and also ~350
> directories (unsuprisingly). Each directory or xml file occupies a
> separate block, and there is a very significant cost to moving the heads
> to many of them to read them; at least, so the previous discussion, and
> my timings seem to show. [1]

Before anyone responds to this with 'but who cares it's just a few seeks
on a local disk' I'd like to remind people that networks using gnome
tend to have central file storage and around 9am when everyone logs in
you can definitely feel it.

-sv