[ ... ] > Apparently not many people have figured out in the Linux > culture that general purpose filesystems cannot handle well > large groups of small files, and since the beginning of > computing various forms of "aggregate" files have been used > for that, like 'ar' ('.a') files from UNIX, which should have > been used far more commonly than has happened, and never mind > things like BDB/GDBM databases. As to this, another filesystem strongly oriented at massive streaming, Lustre, is sometimes used for small-file workloads, and one of the suggestions given for that is to put the small files inside an 'ext2' filesystem in a file, and mount it via 'loop'. That is to use 'ext2' (or some other filesystem type) as an archive format. That is less crazy than it seems. [ ... ] _______________________________________________ xfs mailing list xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs