On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 19:32, Wouter Van Hemel wrote:
IIRC all typical filesystems for Linux (ext3, xfs, jfs, reiserfs) use directory indexing, usually by means of a b-tree.
They are optional on ext3 and I don't think they are on by default.
In real life, things aren't as clean-cut as in most of those generic benchmarks, and people tend to attach too much importance to them and then usually get into silly flamewars. :)
If the main use is a mail server with maildir storage the speed of creating/deleting files is going to the the main factor.
In the past, I've spent (wasted) quite some time benchmarking things like FreeBSD vs Linux, Perl vs PHP, template systems, etc. Now I believe that people should just pick what they feel comfortable with, because the differences are often not that large and it's rarely worth their time and money.
Well, now you can usually afford to throw a few more gigs of RAM in and let buffering solve the problem. That used to be much more expensive.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com