Re: [Pan-devel] The Blue Sky Becomes Clear - part 01: Basic Thoughts - revision 00

[Duncan]

On Thu 03 Apr 2003 08:03, Haran Shivanan posted as excerpted below:
> How about a new way of storing the cached articles?
> Currently, each article is stored in a separate file, which means the
> directory is littered with hundreds or thousands of files with each
> burning a (typically) 4KB inode (for linux installations).

[Meta:  It seems we are getting double posts right now, but I'm going to use 
this to my advantage here, since I'm taking this subthread in an entirely 
different direction than the others, and put this response on the unresponded 
copy..]

I'd argue that your statement about Linux is incorrect.  This isn't MSWormOS.  
We aren't stuck with some limited choice of proprietary fs formats.  There 
are all sorts of fs formats to meet all sorts of different needs.  In this 
case, ReiserFS is a perfect choice, since it deals with small files, or 
"tails" of large files, by tucking them directly into the fs structure, 
packing them together with the directory meta-data.  There is little or no 
wasted space, since tails (and files smaller than a fs block) are packed 
together (unless of course the -notails mount option is used).

I run my entire Linux system (except for the swap, of course) on reiserfs 
partitions.  However, here, it would work just as well to stick the PAN cache 
on a dedicated reiserfs partition.  There's another advantage to that as well 
-- you can set the cache size to the entire partition and not worry about it 
taking to much space on your other multi-use partitions, or otherwise having 
the data mixed up.  Here, I use a dedicated /news partition for that.

Of course, if we were talking W9x and FAT, that'd be an entirely different 
matter, but even back there, I made use of dedicated partitions and FAT32 to 
make as efficient use of the space as possible, purchasing and using 
Partition Magic to manage the partitions as needed, allowing me to make even 
more efficient use than the default, by using smaller clusters.  The other 
alternative was FAT16, and using DriveSpace, perhaps in non-compress mode, 
just for it's packing ability, which is what I did back on W95, b4 FAT32 
(altho I did use the compression, as disks weren't hundreds of gigabytes back 
then as they are now <g>).

-- 
Duncan
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin