From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S265533AbUBFU01 (ORCPT ); Fri, 6 Feb 2004 15:26:27 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S265636AbUBFU01 (ORCPT ); Fri, 6 Feb 2004 15:26:27 -0500 Received: from fw.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:1737 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S265533AbUBFU00 convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Fri, 6 Feb 2004 15:26:26 -0500 Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2004 12:27:52 -0800 From: Andrew Morton To: Taneli =?ISO-8859-1?Q?V=E4h=E4kangas?= Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Limit hash table size Message-Id: <20040206122752.4dc9f434.akpm@osdl.org> In-Reply-To: <20040206202006.GA19473@firmament.fi> References: <20040205155813.726041bd.akpm@osdl.org.suse.lists.linux.kernel> <20040205190904.0cacd513.akpm@osdl.org> <20040206202006.GA19473@firmament.fi> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.9.7 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i586-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Taneli Vähäkangas wrote: > > OTOH, I'd very much > appreciate if the system didn't act very sluggish during updatedb. It really helps if your filesystems were laid out by a 2.6 kernel. What usually happens at present is that you install the distro using a 2.4 kernel and then install 2.6. So all those files under /usr/bin and /usr/include and everywhere else are laid down by the 2.4 kernel. Problem is, 2.4's ext2 and ext3 don't have the Orlov allocator, which lays files out in a much more updatedb-friendly way. I've seen the disk bandwidth quadruple as updatedb switches from a 2.4-laid-out partition to a 2.6-laid-out partition.