[openbeos] Re: Max number of files on BFS?

Mikael Jansson wrote on Sat, 28 Aug 2004 08:11:08 GMT:
> The reason I ask this is because I noticed my system got a lot faster 
> when I moved over all my email (10k files) to another volume than the 
> boot volume, and now I intend to keep it that way, because of the ease-
> of-use when backing up (instead of having to do the zip -9ry dance.)

BFS does suffer from fragmentation problems, particularly with e-mail when you 
get a lot (thousands) of new files (messages) and delete most of them (spam).  
Besides having normal file fragmentation, the indices also get fragmented, 
which affects the time it takes to create/destroy e-mail files (since each 
e-mail could affect a dozen indices).  Running chkbfs also becomes slower (and 
its slowness is a good measure of how fragmented your disk is).

If you reformat the drive (and recreate the new empty indices needed for mail) 
and then copy over all the mail files (with Tracker or Zip to preserve the 
attributes), it will be noticably faster, for a while.

- Alex

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