Heavy creation and deletion of symlinks
Charles Swiger
cswiger at mac.com
Thu Jun 8 00:15:53 UTC 2006
On Jun 6, 2006, at 10:49 PM, Dag Rune Sneeggen wrote:
> So my question is; how does such activity affect the general health
> and operation of FreeBSD?
It doesn't, really. The OS will happily deference the symlinks you
create as needed.
> Also, the health of the harddrive(s) which will most likely be SATA
> disks.
Decent-quality disk drives shouldn't have any problems operating
under continuous load, but some low-end "desktop" drives aren't rated
for continuous operation. You should probably look into setting up a
RAID-1, -10, or -5 configuration.
> It is my understanding that symlinks only affects the file
> allocation table, and not the physical data blocks? This would mean
> that the impact isn't so terrible, as the changes will be contained
> to a relatively small part of the beginning of the disk, correct?
No, that is not correct. The FFS doesn't have a single "file
allocation table", it has inodes scattered throughout the various
cylinder groups, which will span the entire disk. Inodes contain
some metadata which corresponds to aspects of the MS-DOS FAT.
Some Unix systems utilize "fast symlinks" if the symlink is small
enough (less than 50 characters or so), which are kept in the inode;
otherwise, for longer symlinks, those are stored as data in sectors
just like a normal file would be.
--
-Chuck
More information about the freebsd-questions
mailing list