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Operating Systems AIX What is the limitation in AIX? Post 302804009 by bakunin on Tuesday 7th of May 2013 11:55:12 PM
Old 05-08-2013
What DGPickett means is the following:

A directory is quite similar to a file and the bigger a file gets the longer it takes the system to read it, which is to be expected. Run a "grep" against a file of 10GB and it will take longer than against a file of 1k size.

Let us consider the case where you issue a command

Code:
grep regexp /path/to/some/file

What happens? Before "grep" can start its work the operating system has to find out which file to open. So it looks in the directory "/path/to/some" and searches there for the inode of "file". A "directory" now is nothing else than a (quite unsorted) list of file names and inode-numbers. The longer this list is the longer it will take the take the OS to search it and find the inode it is interested in.

Usually you won't notice even this difference because the OS uses otherwise unused parts of the memory to buffer such information. This is part of the "file system cache": the system won't read the directory information from disk, but use the copy it has already stored in memory. As memory is much faster than disk this will speed up things considerably. But as the directory gets bigger and bigger and memory is a limited resource at some point the list might not fit in memory any more additionally hurting the speed with which this list is searched.

Bottom line: even if there are no theoretical limits there is some practical limit to directory sizes. This practical limit is pushed as hardware gets faster and memory keeps getting bigger, disks getting faster, etc.., but it still remains.

To split a large directory there is no "standard tool" like there is "split" for files. Just create new directories and use "mv" to move files from one to the other. A command like

Code:
mv /path/to/file /other/path

will physically move a file only of the directories "/path/to" and "/other/path" are not part of the same filesystem. If they are it is simply a matter of removing the directory information from the one list and putting it into the other. It will take the same time regardless of file size, because the file itself is not touched, just "file metadata" - information about files instead of files themselves.

I hope this clears things up.

bakunin
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CACHEINFO(5)							AFS File Reference						      CACHEINFO(5)

NAME
cacheinfo - Defines configuration parameters for the Cache Manager DESCRIPTION
The cacheinfo file defines configuration parameters for the Cache Manager, which reads the file as it initializes. The file contains a single line of ASCII text and must reside in the /etc/openafs directory. Use a text editor to create it during initial configuration of the client machine; the required format is as follows: <mount>:<cache>:<size> where <mount> Names the local disk directory at which the Cache Manager mounts the AFS namespace. It must exist before the afsd program runs. The conventional value is /afs. Using any other value prevents traversal of pathnames that begin with /afs (such as pathnames to files in foreign cells that do use the conventional name). The -mountdir argument to the afsd command overrides this value. <cache> Names the local disk directory to use as a cache. It must exist before the afsd program runs. The standard value is /usr/vice/cache, but it is acceptable to substitute a directory on a partition with more available space. Although the Cache Manager ignores this field when configuring a memory cache, a value must always appear in it. The -cachedir argument to the afsd command overrides this value. <size> Specifies the cache size as a number of 1-kilobyte blocks. Larger caches generally yield better performance, but a disk cache must not exceed 90% of the space available on the cache partition (85% for AIX systems), and a memory cache must use no more than 25% of available machine memory. The -blocks argument to the afsd command overrides this value. To reset cache size without rebooting on a machine that uses disk caching, use the fs setcachesize command. To display the current size of a disk or memory cache between reboots, use the fs getcacheparms command. EXAMPLES
The following example cacheinfo file mounts the AFS namespace at /afs, establishes a disk cache in the /usr/vice/cache directory, and defines cache size as 50,000 1-kilobyte blocks. /afs:/usr/vice/cache:50000 SEE ALSO
afsd(8), fs_getcacheparms(1), fs_setcachesize(1) COPYRIGHT
IBM Corporation 2000. <http://www.ibm.com/> All Rights Reserved. This documentation is covered by the IBM Public License Version 1.0. It was converted from HTML to POD by software written by Chas Williams and Russ Allbery, based on work by Alf Wachsmann and Elizabeth Cassell. OpenAFS 2012-03-26 CACHEINFO(5)
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