But what about less INODES (Re: Need more inodes)

[Richard M. Mathews]

jpe at egr.duke.edu (John P. Eisenmenger) writes:

>I noticed something yesterday that I'm not happy about in the least.  When
>I ran "du" (while setting up "spacegripe") I noticed that all of the file
>block sizes were multiples of 4.  In other words, it looks like IBM decided
>to not have any fragmented blocks.  Being that my machine will be the target
>for many, many small files (spice input files, etc.), this is a very unat-
>tractive "feature" although I can see how it would speed up the filesystem.

You don't mention what platform you are on (please, everyone, platform
and release information is very helpful).  I don't know what AIX on the
6000s does.  AIX/370 and AIX PS/2 lack a real fragmentation scheme, but
they do have a way of storing files of less than 384 bytes in the space
normally used for inodes.  The "du" and "ls" commands will show these as
using up 0 blocks.  Unfortunately, the 384 byte limit is small enough
that not much more than small directories (and most importantly, hidden
directories) can take advantage of this.  The problem in AIX/370 and
AIX PS/2 has been with combining fragmentation with the shadow block
mechanism used to atomically commit or abort file system changes.

Richard M. Mathews			D efend
richard at locus.com			 E stonian-Latvian-Lithuanian
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