Re: kmail corrupts emails [solved]
Am Dienstag, 27. September 2005 16:48 schrieb Randy Kramer:
> First a quick (but dumb, I should look it up) question. Does Linux do the
> thing that Dos/Windows does (used to do?) of each file requiring a minimum
> space (one cluster?), or does it vary by filesystem?
That never had anything to do with DOS or Linux, it's always a matter of the
filesystem. ReiserFS can handle that, all others (e.g. XFS, ext3) don't.
However, that's not reason for me to use ReiserFS, hard drives are big enough
these days (this may be different for REALLY lots of small files like a nntp
spool).
> Then, I can remember (again, back in my dos/Windows days) two problems that
> I may mix up a little bit. I guess the first was the limitation on the
> number of files on a disk based on the size of the (primary?) FAT, which
> was, iirc, overcome by allowing secondary or virtual FATs (or something
> along those lines). I'm sure that's not a problem in Linux.
Again, do not stick to OS thinkings but stay with the filesystem, please!
ext2/ext3 do have an inode limit (you can define that at FS creation time),
XFS and ReiserFS don't.
> The 2nd problem, referenced above--I did run into applications where the
> number of files in a directory was so large that the access time for a file
> became unacceptable because (I guess) of the time required to search the
> FAT?
Maybe, again you win XFS and ReiserFS, ext[23] also need quite some time for
large directories (there is caching support in ext3 with later kernels, IIRC,
that speeds that up).
> How is a search for a file name done in Linux--is it a linear type thing?
> (Without being very conversant in big O notation, I'm trying to ask if it's
> proportional to the number of entries (file names) in the directory (would
> that be O[n]?), or does it do something more clever (would that be O[1}?).
> Or, again, does it depend on the file system, (and maybe Reiser's has that
> (potential) problem licked?)
It's again dependent on the filesystem.
HS
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