* Steinar H. Gunderson: > On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 03:12:33PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote: >> The most common performance issue with ext3 file systems is caused by >> software that accesses files in the order returned by readdir. Has >> this been ruled out? > > What other, sane alternatives are there? Should the list be sorted by some > measure?
Sorting by inode number is a good idea. Debian's mutt package contains a patch which implements this. > (Alphabetically? By some hash? What about other file systems, like > ReiserFS, which sorts internally by other hashes?) Sorting by inode number helps ext2 as well, but only a bit. Only file systems with random inode numbers will experience a performance decrease.