From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1765218AbXHDUMs (ORCPT ); Sat, 4 Aug 2007 16:12:48 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1756125AbXHDUMk (ORCPT ); Sat, 4 Aug 2007 16:12:40 -0400 Received: from gprs189-60.eurotel.cz ([160.218.189.60]:4088 "EHLO spitz.ucw.cz" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752275AbXHDUMj (ORCPT ); Sat, 4 Aug 2007 16:12:39 -0400 Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2007 20:41:44 +0000 From: Pavel Machek To: Al Viro Cc: Andi Kleen , Ingo Molnar , Andrew Morton , Frank Kingswood , Nick Piggin , Ray Lee , Jesper Juhl , ck list , Paul Jackson , linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: RFT: updatedb "morning after" problem [was: Re: -mm merge plans for 2.6.23] Message-ID: <20070711204143.GA3921@ucw.cz> References: <2c0942db0707240915h56e007e3l9110e24a065f2e73@mail.gmail.com> <46A6CC56.6040307@yahoo.com.au> <46A85D95.509@kingswood-consulting.co.uk> <20070726092025.GA9157@elte.hu> <20070726023401.f6a2fbdf.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20070726094024.GA15583@elte.hu> <20070726102025.GJ27237@ftp.linux.org.uk> <20070726122330.GA21750@one.firstfloor.org> <20070726145952.GK27237@ftp.linux.org.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20070726145952.GK27237@ftp.linux.org.uk> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.9i Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hi! > > That would just save reading the directories. Not sure > > it helps that much. Much better would be actually if it didn't stat the > > individual files (and force their dentries/inodes in). I bet it does that to > > find out if they are directories or not. But in a modern system it could just > > check the type in the dirent on file systems that support > > that and not do a stat. Then you would get much less dentries/inodes. > > FWIW, find(1) does *not* stat non-directories (and neither would this > approach). So it's just dentries for directories and you can't realistically > skip those. OK, you could - if you had banned cross-directory rename > for directories and propagated "dirty since last look" towards root (note > that it would be a boolean, not a timestamp). Then we could skip unchanged > subtrees completely... Could we help it a little from kernel and set 'dirty since last look' on directory renames? I mean, this is not only updatedb. KDE startup is limited by this, too. It would be nice to have effective 'what change in tree' operation. Pavel -- (english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek (cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html