From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Fri, 24 May 2002 16:44:09 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Fri, 24 May 2002 16:44:08 -0400 Received: from mail.webmaster.com ([216.152.64.131]:30711 "EHLO shell.webmaster.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id convert rfc822-to-8bit; Fri, 24 May 2002 16:44:07 -0400 From: David Schwartz To: X-Mailer: PocoMail 2.61 (1025) - Licensed Version Date: Fri, 24 May 2002 13:44:03 -0700 In-Reply-To: <20020524105348.T13411@devserv.devel.redhat.com> Subject: Re: negative dentries wasting ram Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Message-ID: <20020524204404.AAA21553@shell.webmaster.com@whenever> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org >In glibc 2.3 this will be open("/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive", ), so >negative dentries won't be useful for glibc locale handling (that >doesn't mean negative dentries won't be useful for other things, including >exec?p or searching libraries if $LD_LIBRARY_PATH is used). > > Jakub Web servers tend to look for all kinds of things that don't exist. For example, if you hit "http://www.mydomain.com/foo" is there a file called "foo" in the root document directory? Or is "foo" a directory with an "index.html" file in it? And what if index files can be "index.html", "index.htm", or "index.cgi"? A single URL hit can easily involve looking for five files that don't exist before you find the one that does. Of course, some web servers have their own internal URL->file mapping caches. The ideal solution would be to get rid of the negative dentries we aren't using (much? recently?) when we want to get some more free memory. DS