An Ext4 question...

[Dale Farnsworth]

> Does anybody know what happens when you stash a huge number of tiny
> files in Ext4?  Does it store them efficiently the way ReiserFS does?

No.  Neither ext3 nor ext4 efficiently stores sub-block sized files.
The minimum files size granularity is the block size.  The internal
fragmentation can hurt with many small files.

As others have mentioned, reiserfs handles that.  However, I can't
recommend reiserfs unless extra effort is devoted to backups, since
catastrophic failures can result from the loss of a single block
in reiserfs.  I have high hopes for btrfs, which appears to solve
these issues and more, but I haven't switched over to it yet.

-Dale