Garrett: ext4, application expectations and power management
Garrett: ext4, application expectations and power management
Posted Mar 16, 2009 4:38 UTC (Mon) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047)In reply to: Garrett: ext4, application expectations and power management by Tara_Li
Parent article: Garrett: ext4, application expectations and power management
>When I start up Gnome, or KDE, I'm not making any changes to my
configuration - so why are all of the config files getting re-written?
For that matter, why are they using a truckload of tiny files, instead
of one big file of key=value lines? That way, you only update the
metadata once, you pull it all into memory, edit it however you need to,
and once you're done editting it, dump it back to the HD in one single
write operation...
configuration - so why are all of the config files getting re-written?
For that matter, why are they using a truckload of tiny files, instead
of one big file of key=value lines? That way, you only update the
metadata once, you pull it all into memory, edit it however you need to,
and once you're done editting it, dump it back to the HD in one single
write operation...
You would think, wouldn't you? Lots-of-tiny-files is not a good idea for performance reasons, although I can see the advantage in not having to do any parsing, just traverse the directory tree to find the file with the setting you want.
But truncating and recreating them with (possibly) the same data? That's just insane. There is NO good reason for doing that. Even if the files are used the way I described above, and you need to make a change, there is no good reason to use O_TRUNC. Open a new file, write, fsync, close, rename. That's the safe way to do it. And don't recreate a file that isn't changing, for heaven's sakes! What are those desktop environment developers thinking?