How to best do zillions of little files?

[Patrick R. McManus]

> 
> Anyone know of some good info on this topic for various file systems?
> Is there a generallly-useful directory scheme that makes it work well
> (or at least not too poorly) on all linux file systems?

if you want filesystem independence then you've got to go for a
heirarchy. but if you can control the fs you have a lot of options:

with ext2 you're pretty screwed

with resierfs you get btree indexes.. that helps a lot.

the new ext3 htree stuff (for which you need a very excellent patch
here http://thunk.org/tytso/linux/ext3-dxdir/RELEASE-NOTES) it just plain
rocks on all accounts.

here's some good reading: http://people.nl.linux.org/~phillips/htree/paper/htree.html


-Patrick