> OK, that's one possible reason. Not sure I buy it though. If
> the files are created a few days after their parent directory
> then the chance of their data or metadata being within device
> readhead scope of any of the parent dir's blocks seems small?
Algorithm for inode allocation had been written by Kirk back in
'84. You can find some analisys in the original paper (A Fast
Filesystem for UNIX).
BTW, what you want is not "readahead scope of parent dir block".
You want inodes of files in given directory close to each other.
That matters a lot when you do stat() on directory contents,
etc. Moreover, since we attempt to keep data blocks close to
inodes, we want to keep use of cylinder groups more or less
even.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/