linux-kernel - Re: stat benchmark

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Date:	Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:59:26 +0300
From:	Avi Kivity <avi@...ranet.com>
To:	Theodore Tso <tytso@....edu>, Ulrich Drepper <drepper@...il.com>,
	Soeren Sandmann <sandmann@...mi.au.dk>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: stat benchmark

Theodore Tso wrote:
>> Aside from what has already been proposed there is also the
>> readdirplus() route.  Unfortunately the people behind this and related
>> proposals vanished after the last discussions.  I was  hoping they
>> come back with a revised proposal but perhaps not.  Maybe it's time to
>> pick up the ball myself.
>>
>> As a reminder, readdirplus() is an extended readdir() which also
>> returns (a subset of) the stat information for the file at the same
>> time.  The subset part is needed to account for the different
>> information contained in the inodes.  For most applications the subset
>> should be sufficient and therefore all that's needed is a single
>> iteration over the directory.
>>     
>
> I'm not sure this would help in the cold cache case, which is what
> Soeren originally complained about.[1] The problem is whaever
> information the user might need won't be store in the directory, so
> the filesystem would end having to stat the file anyway, incurring a
> disk seek, which was what the user was complaining about.  A
> readdirplus() would save a whole bunch of system calls if the inode
> was already cached, yes, but I'm not sure that's it would be worth the
> effort given how small Linux's system call overhead would be.  But in
> the cold cache case, you end up seeking all over the disk, and the
> only thing you can do is to try to keep the inodes close to each
> other, and to have either readdir() or the caller of readdir() sort
> all of the returned directory entries by inode number to avoid seeking
> all over the disk.
>   

A readdirplus() could sort the inodes according to the filesystem's 
layout, and additionally issue the stats in parallel, so if you have 
multiple spindles you get significant additional speedup.

-- 
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function

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