LWN.net Logo

Developer interview: Eric Sandeen on ext4 implementation

Developer interview: Eric Sandeen on ext4 implementation

Posted Mar 8, 2008 20:20 UTC (Sat) by rjamestaylor (guest, #339)
In reply to: Developer interview: Eric Sandeen on ext4 implementation by ArbitraryConstant
Parent article: Developer interview: Eric Sandeen on ext4 implementation

> ext2/3 can exhaust their inodes if you're doing something with tons of small files

Yes, it can!

I've had clients use things like phpThumb to create millions (in one case, 6 million+) of
under 1K files in a single directory and then wonder why they are out of disk space and why
IOWait is so high... *sigh* There is nothing so idiot-proof that an educated idiot can't
break.


(Log in to post comments)

Second law of Engineering

Posted Mar 9, 2008 20:27 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

I heard it called that...

It is impossible to create anything idiot-proof. As soon as you manage to create something no existing idiot can foul up, the universe makes a bigger idiot.

Developer interview: Eric Sandeen on ext4 implementation

Posted Mar 15, 2008 14:50 UTC (Sat) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

If they didn't know about the limitation it is a bit harsh to call them idiots. I think it is
a perfectly fair assumption that a modern computer should be able to handle a couple of
million files without hiccups. After all, one would consider a database broken if it slowed
down after six million records. The difference here is historical rather than technical.

Copyright © 2008, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds
Powered by Rackspace Managed Hosting.