Filesystems and case-insensitivity

Posted Nov 28, 2018 20:34 UTC (Wed) by saffroy (guest, #43999)
In reply to: Filesystems and case-insensitivity by sorokin
Parent article: Filesystems and case-insensitivity

Doing this for most existing system calls would be inefficient

Well, it really depends on the use case (pun intended). Once I added case-insensitivity support to a proprietary filesystem specifically to improve performance, with great success.

Consider a case-sensitive folder with 10.000 files (this is not rare at all), shared over Samba. Every time a Samba client requests creation of a new file, and because the client requires case insensitivity, Samba has to scan the entire folder to check if the new name collides with an existing name. Yes, that's for every new file.

If the filesystem is actually case-insensitive, Samba can skip these scans, which is a huge performance boost.