O_HOT and O_COLD

Surely this is what a sysadmin is for? The app dev or whatever tells me what they want to do and I provide the environment for their app. They probably shouldn't try and eliminate me by trying to speak to the fs devs directly. Especially when that conversation is one way, with rather basic semantics (hot n cold) and with an unknown other end (which fs exactly)!

I haven't even started on looking at RAID, spindle layout, SAN, NAS, iSCSI, FC, RAM, processors, network and all the other factors that will affect your app.

I much prefer the idea of an fs that optimizes itself in the way indicated in the article which looks at the load over time and moves things around. I might specify that and then watch what it does to see if it helps or hinders in the particular case. Perhaps it could be invoked with a flag at certain times. Otherwise I'd do some pre production testing depending on how important it is. Either way, I'll probably beat a simplistic flag.

It reminds me of the mess that MS SQL and Exchange's "memory managers" tend to create on a Windows box. It's particularly hilarious on an SBS ...

Leave file system allocation to the experts (fs devs) and don't try to hinder them with this. Even if the proposal came from one!

Cheers
Jon