Hans Wilmer wrote: > > Can it be that ext3 is considerably faster than ext2 in accessing > large amounts of files in a directory? I've collected about 32000 > mails (i. e. files because I'm using maildir) from the list in my > debian-users folder. When switching into that folder, mutt reads the > headers (or whatever) from the mails; when switching off the folder, > it updates the mails. > > With ext2, this took quite long, but with ext3 it seems to be much > faster :) How comes? > heh. Mail produces "slow-growth" files. Which means that their blocks are sprinkled all over the disk. If you're adding a few k per hour to a file, the fs just about never manages to allocate the blocks contiguously. A while back, I had a six-month-old multi-megabyte mailbox which had precisely *zero* contiguous blocks. It was 100% fragmented! If you copy one of these files onto a new file, the new file is magically unfragmented, and access to it is much faster. In your case, it seems that you have many small files in the same directory. I bet the directory itself is fragmented, for the same reason - slow growth. Did you copy the files at some stage? That would unfrag the directory. And the inode table. For the above reasons, I partition my machines with all partitions the same size, and keep one free. For the monthly theraputic copy-all-files-and-switch-mountpoints speedup. It's all a bit sad, really. -
