On Sun, 7 Jan 2007, Jon Smirl wrote:
quoted
- proper read-ahead. Right now, even if the directory is totally
contiguous on disk (just remove the thing that writes data to the
files, so that you'll have empty files instead of 8kB files), I think
we do those reads totally synchronously if the filesystem was mounted
with directory hashing enabled.
What's the status on the Adaptive Read-ahead patch from Wu Fengguang
[off-list ref] ? That patch really helped with read ahead
problems I was having with mmap. It was in mm forever and I've lost
track of it.
Won't help. ext3 does NO readahead at all. It doesn't use the general VFS
helper routines to read data (because it doesn't use the page cache), it
just does the raw buffer-head IO directly.
(In the non-indexed case, it does do some read-ahead, and it uses the
generic routines for it, but because it does everything by physical
address, even the generic routines will decide that it's just doing random
reading if the directory isn't physically contiguous - and stop reading
ahead).
(I may have missed some case where it does do read-ahead in the index
routines, so don't take my word as being unquestionably true. I'm _fairly_
sure, but..)
Linus