Filesystem performance problems

[Matt Graham]

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....

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see