[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

Ah, so my >100 spam emails that get deleted every day could well be 
causing my system to appear to be crawling these days (compared to BeOS 
usually, not to windows or anything of course :D)

I was planning a full BeOS install from scratch procedure when I'm back 
at uni with a nice quick net connection.

Anything planned for Haiku to alleviate this? I guess the nifty 
intelligent defragger is an R2 thing :) - any chance it could be made 
to happen automatically when necessary, without having to run a 
"defrag" type program?


Simon

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