[Pvfs2-developers] Listing performance patch

[Phil Carns]

Sam Lang wrote:
> 
> Hi Bart,
> 
> Thanks for the patch.  For users with that many files in a directory, 
> using pvfs2-ls is probably a good alternative.
> 
> The kernel does readdir requests 32 entries at a time, so increasing 
> MAX_NUM_DIRENTS won't help for ls.  Long listings requires getting the 
> size of files, which in PVFS is fairly expensive.
> 
> Unfortunately, we haven't kept up with the readdirplus implementation, 
> some bugs have probably crept in since Murali added that tool.  If you 
> were motivated to look at where the servers were crashing, we'd 
> certainly be interested in helping with the debugging there.
> 
> Thanks again,
> -sam

It does look like ls improved with the patches for some reason, though.

The 256 and 512 results are also just about close enough to be noise. 
It looks like most of the benefit came from the jump from 32/64 to 256.

-Phil