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A report from OSCON 2007

Posted Aug 3, 2007 4:15 UTC (Fri) by Nick (guest, #15060)
In reply to: A report from OSCON 2007 by jwb
Parent article: A report from OSCON 2007

Trying to open file names that don't exist should not always go to disk.
The kernel has negative dentry caching, so only the first such access
would hit the disk (no different from opening a file that does exist).

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Posted Aug 3, 2007 4:56 UTC (Fri) by arjan (subscriber, #36785) [Link]

that's indeed true in theory. In practice it seems that the lifespan of negative dentries is so short that you still go to disk ;(