[OpenAFS-devel] Large-Cache Initialization (Proposal)

[Derek Atkins]

So I tried (and failed) to initialize a 3GB AFS Cache last night.
I set my Linux (RH 6.2/Linux 2.2/ext2-fs) box to the task around
8pm or so last night, and at 9am this morning it was still chugging
along.  I gave up, newfs'd the cache partition, reset the cache size
to 325MB, and the initialization was done in a few minutes.

I'd like to fix this.

My guess (I haven't done any tests yet, but I will) is that the
directory is getting so large that the cache-file creation is taking
more and more time as the cache gets bigger.  My plan would be to
break up the cache directory into multiple sub-directories, to try to
keep each directory to a 'reasonable' size (say, ~2000-2500 files?)

This would definitely require changes to afsd to build/scan a
directory hierarchy instead of a single directory.  I think it might
also require changes to 'fs' (for setcachesize).

I wanted to get feedback about my proposed approach before I spend the
time to actually build such a system.

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord@MIT.EDU                        PGP key available