Re: [RFC] Improved inode number allocation for HTree

From: John Bradford <john@grabjohn.com>
To: phillips@arcor.de (Daniel Phillips)
Cc: ext2-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
	tytso@mit.edu, adilger@clusterfs.com, chrisl@vmware.com,
	bzzz@tmi.comex.ru
Subject: Re: [RFC] Improved inode number allocation for HTree
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 21:04:03 +0000 (GMT)	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <200303102104.h2AL43iZ000875@81-2-122-30.bradfords.org.uk> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20030310204431.9C72D103F6D@mx12.arcor-online.net> from "Daniel Phillips" at Mar 10, 2003 09:48:36 PM

> Though the journal only becomes involved when blocks are modified,
> unfortunately, because of atime updates, this includes all directory
> operations.  We could suggest to users that they should disable
> atime updating if they care about performance, but we ought to be
> able to do better than that.

On a separate note, since atime updates are not usually very important
anyway, why not have an option to cache atime updates for a long time,
or until either a write occurs anyway.  Holding a large number of
atime updates in a write cache is generally not going to be a major
issue - the worst case if a partition isn't cleanly unmounted is that
some atimes will be wrong.

John.