Bad performance when accessing a lot of small files

[Alfred Perlstein]

* Alexandre Biancalana <biancalana at gmail.com> [071221 15:53] wrote:
> On 12/21/07, Alfred Perlstein <alfred at freebsd.org> wrote:
> >
> > What application are you scanning these files with?  I know I had
> > issues with rsync in particular where I had to have it rsync
> > smaller pieces of a collection for it to work nicely instead of
> > going for the whole heirarchy.
> 
> tar
> 
> I run tar in the /backup/<hostname>/YYYYMMDD writing to LTO3 tape
> drive, the problem is that when origin directory contains a lot of
> small files the process is *much* more slow.... this is my question
> since the thread start.

Have you tried the 'noatime' mount option?  That should help.

Can you provide a histogram of the count of files per directory?

-- 
- Alfred Perlstein