Re: the correct way to read a big directory? Mutt?
On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 04:12:15PM +0200, Nicolas George wrote:
> Le quintidi 5 floréal, an CCXXIII, Vincent Lefevre a écrit :
> > Now I wonder whether the use of the hash by ext3 is a good idea...
> >
> > Alternatively, I suppose that a SSD disk could improve things.
>
> Well, filesystems can not be optimized for every use.
Ext3 dates from 2001, and is an incremental update to the ext2 design from
1993. Large-scale storage on flash devices was very uncommon then, and the
rise of modern SSDs didn't start until around 2008 iirc.
> Having myriads of small files has always been a bad idea anyway, it trashes
> the inode and dentries cache, it costs extra disk bandwidth (because you can
> not read half a sector at the end of the file) and latency (because of all
> the seeks, even when reading in order, it will be more fragmented than a
> single file), etc. Of course, nowadays, huge RAM and SSD will mitigate the
> issue.
Mail storage is a lose-lose situation, really. Maildir improves the performance
and reliability of parallel operations on a mailbox versus mbox, but is less
space efficient precicely because of the metadata overhead, especially for
large mailboxes. One should keep high-read boxes in Mailidir and low-read,
large-size archival mailboxes in mbox, potentially compressed. The archivemail
tool can assist with moving one to the other.
> It is a tragedy that a standard, robust and efficient format for mailboxes
> was never designed and adopted.
It's a tragedy that many such standards were invented :)
Reply to: