This is just a thought exercise.... but I'm curious what would exactly be involved in essentially biasing caching such that a 'ls -al' was never slow.
In my experience, IO speed an vary, but if a user types "ls -al" in the shell and the response isn't nearly instantaneous they start calling IT staff. Being able to cache all that data (perhaps by priming it) ensuring its not bumped out later would be interesting. For ZFS this is primarily a function of ZAP and DNLC, correct? Does "metadata" caching satisfy everything a directory listing could want or are there bits of data that slip through requiring actual disk IO? benr. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
