Filesystem performance problems

[Dennis Kibbe]

On Sun, 2011-08-21 at 14:07 -0700, Matt Graham wrote:
> From: Dennis Kibbe <dennisk at mesacc.edu>
> > On Sun, 2011-08-21 at 12:57 -0700, Nathan England wrote:
> >> I have a hard drive that I use for storing and working with large tar
> >> archives. It seems that after a few months of working with these
> >> archives, unpacking, making modifications and tarring them back up,
> >> the whole system will get very slow, but particularly this drive.
> 
> >> Currently, this is an ext4 partition. I do not believe this ever
> >> happened with an ext3 partition 
> > Are all the files in one directory? I made the mistake of putting a few
> > thousand image files in one directory. It slowed access to a crawl.
> 
> This seems kind of odd.  Back from 2002..2006, we had an ext3 partition with
> many directories, and many of those directories had well over 10,000 files in
> them.  Most of these files were less than 100K.  Disk I/O was quite fast, and
> we never really had any problems at all with having so many files in one
> directory, even with a few really huge dirs that had over 400,000 files in
> them.  Did they mess something up with ext4?
> 
> Also, isn't there a mailing list for ext4 somewhere?  I'm sure they'd love to
> hear about this here problem if it can be reproduced....
> 

Actually I take back my comment. It wasn't the file system that was slow
but rendering all the thumbnails each time the directory was opened in
Nautilus, etc.

Dennis Kibbe 
-- 
Adjunct Faculty
Linux Operating System and System Administration
Business and Information Systems
Mesa Community College, Mesa, Arizona