RE: Performance

[Murray Cumming Comneon com]

> To: Alexander Larsson
> >> Why not maintain a cache of mime-types, for all 
> non-recently modified 
> >> files ? Certainly would speedup things a lots on big $HOME 
> and such.
> >
> > I don't like caches like this. They use a lot of memory 
> that might not 
> > be needed, and there can be all sorts of problems if the cache go 
> > stale and contain invalid data. Keeping the cache not invalid often 
> > takes as much time as what you were trying to avoid doing 
> by cacheing.
> 
> what about storing the mime type in an extended attribute if 
> the file system supports them. If the file system doesn't it 
> will work as always has (doing mime type sniffing) but if 
> there is an EA containing the mime type we would have to go 
> trouht the sniffing process, and thus it would be faster.

That sounds like just a more elegant cache to me, which wouldn't solve the
staleness problem.

Murray Cumming
www.murrayc.com
murrayc usa net