From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262004AbULPTIl (ORCPT ); Thu, 16 Dec 2004 14:08:41 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261985AbULPTEj (ORCPT ); Thu, 16 Dec 2004 14:04:39 -0500 Received: from psych.st-and.ac.uk ([138.251.11.1]:49828 "EHLO psych.st-andrews.ac.uk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261989AbULPTDR (ORCPT ); Thu, 16 Dec 2004 14:03:17 -0500 Subject: Re: file as a directory From: Peter Foldiak To: Hans Reiser Cc: David Masover , reiserfs-list@namesys.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org In-Reply-To: <41C1D870.2020407@namesys.com> References: <200411301631.iAUGVT8h007823@laptop11.inf.utfsm.cl> <41ACA7C9.1070001@namesys.com> <1103043518.21728.159.camel@pear.st-and.ac.uk> <41BF21BC.1020809@namesys.com> <1103059622.2999.17.camel@grape.st-and.ac.uk> <41BFC1C5.1070302@slaphack.com> <1103102854.30601.12.camel@pear.st-and.ac.uk> <41C0CF3B.1030705@slaphack.com> <41C1D870.2020407@namesys.com> Content-Type: text/plain Message-Id: <1103223664.2336.335.camel@pear.st-and.ac.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.2.3 Date: 16 Dec 2004 19:01:04 +0000 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, 2004-12-16 at 18:48, Hans Reiser wrote: > David Masover wrote: > > Speaking of which, how much speed is lost by starting up a process? > > > > The idea of caching is that running > > > > cat *; cat *; cat *; cat *; cat * > > > > is probably slower than > > > > cat * > baz; cat baz; cat baz; cat baz; cat baz; cat baz > > Only for small files where the per file overhead of a read is significant. But if the glued "file" is a stream (or pipe?) you can't do everything with it (e.g. seek() ) that you could do with a proper file, right? You may want to do everything with it that you can do with a proper file.