Re: [Ext2-devel] Re: Shrinking ext3 directories

[Ville Herva <vherva@niksula.hut.fi>]

On Thu, Jun 20, 2002 at 03:45:51PM +0200, you [Daniel Phillips] wrote:
> 
> And in the accidental-untar case that started this thread, Raul would
> have the same complaint: a directory bloats up and never unbloats
> until completely emptied.

Not only accidental untar, but buggy progs as well. Recently, I found out
that named had created tens of thousands of (luckily zero-length) files in a
single dir on ext2. While it only took couple of hours to delete them with
"find . -name '...'| xargs -n 5000 rm" commands, I can imagine remote DOS
attacks through daemons that create local temp files. Accessing such
directory quickly becomes slow as molasses on ext2.

Daniels patch seems great. I also recall someone (Ted T'so? Stephen Tweedie?)
had another dir access speed-up patch for ext3... Is that applicable to ext2
or was it already merged?


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