Call for feedback on a Ports-collection change

[Sergei Kolobov]

On 2004-01-09 at 00:07 -0500, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> At 10:17 PM -0600 1/8/04, Mark Linimon wrote:
> >In any case worrying about inode count strikes me as an
> >early- to mid-90s kind of problem.  Fry's has 250Gs on the
> >shelf.  ISTM that there's room for lots of inodes on that.
> 
> That's a lot of DISK SPACE, but no matter how large the
> disk is, it is unwieldy to have files which are 100 bytes
> per inode, instead of (maybe) 2000 bytes per inode.
> 
> When I'm talking about larger disks, I'm thinking that as
> the size of the disk increases, the more you're going to
> have larger values for f_bsize or f_frsize (in statfvs).
> You don't want a 200gig disk with a 256 byte block-size.
> And if you have a 8192-byte block size, then you're wasting
> disk space on almost every file in the ports-tree.
> 
> Not only that, but you're killing performance when doing
> operations on the entire ports tree (an operation such as
> 'cvsup').  The amount of time to find-and-read ten small
> files is going to be much more than to find-and-read one
> larger file (particularly if that entire larger file can
> still fit in a single block on the disk).

How about putting the effort into improving UFS2 then?
Or, perhaps, creating a new file system that handles 
a lot of tiny files better than the existing file systems?

FWIW, I think that the port infrastructure change you proposing
creates more problems than it solves. ;)

Sergei
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/attachments/20040109/fbe593f5/attachment.bin