ZFS directory with a large number of files

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Tue, Aug 02, 2011 at 08:39:03AM +0100, seanrees at gmail.com wrote:
> On my FreeBSD 8.2-S machine (built circa 12th June), I created a
> directory and populated it over the course of 3 weeks with about 2
> million individual files.

I'll keep this real simple:

Why did you do this?

I hope this was a stress test of some kind.  If not:

This is the 2nd or 3rd mail in recent months from people saying "I
decided to do something utterly stupid with my filesystem[1] and now I'm
asking why performance sucks".

Why can people not create proper directory tree layouts to avoid this
problem regardless of what filesystem is used?  I just don't get it.

[1]: Applies to any filesystem, not just ZFS.  There was a UFS one a
month or two ago too...

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                   Mountain View, CA, US |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.               PGP 4BD6C0CB |