Re: Kernel SCM saga..

[Neil Brown <neilb@cse.unsw.edu.au>]

On Saturday April 9, willy@w.ods.org wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 09, 2005 at 05:47:08PM +1000, Neil Brown wrote:
> > On Saturday April 9, willy@w.ods.org wrote:
> > > 
> > > I've just checked, it takes 5.7s to compare 2.4.29{,-hf3} over NFS (13300
> > > files each) and 1.3s once the trees are cached locally. This is without
> > > comparing file contents, just meta-data. And it takes 19.33s to compare
> > > the file's md5 sums once the trees are cached. I don't know if there are
> > > ways to avoid some NFS operations when everything is cached.
> > > 
> > > Anyway, the system does not seem much efficient on hard links, it caches
> > > the files twice :-(
> > 
> > I suspect you'll be wanting to add a "no_subtree_check" export option
> > on your NFS server...
> 
> Thanks a lot, Neil ! This is very valuable information. I didn't
> understand such implications from the exports(5) man page, but it
> makes a great difference. And the diff sped up from 5.7 to 3.9s
> and from 19.3 to 15.3s.

No, that implication had never really occurred to me before either.
But when you said "caches the file twice" it suddenly made sense.
With subtree_check, the NFS file handle contains information about the
directory, and NFS uses the filehandle as the primary key to tell if
two things are the same or not.

Trond keeps prodding me to make no_subtree_check the default.  Maybe it
is time that I actually did....

NeilBrown
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