[OpenAFS] AFS version of du

Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH allbery@ece.cmu.edu
Tue, 4 May 2010 02:17:25 -0400


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On May 3, 2010, at 11:38 , Steve Simmons wrote:
> On May 1, 2010, at 1:35 AM, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
>> On Apr 30, 2010, at 14:32 , Richard Brittain wrote:
>>> This solves my immediate need, and I'll probably use your mount  
>>> point database too, but begs the question of why perl's
>>> File::Find module works fine, while 'find' breaks.  Underneath  
>>> they are presumably making very similar system calls.
>>
>> . . . .  File::Find has gone through a lot of development aimed at  
>> reducing its impact on the system, whereas in my experience the GNU  
>> folks tend to prefer the throw-more-resources-at-it method.
>
> The findutils developers seem to be an exception to this. In my  
> correspondence with them they were pretty firm about not adding  
> overhead. Their goal was that any features added that were specific  
> to afs, cifs, etc should not add overhead to systems that did not  
> have that filesystem type. I can't speak to how well they succeeded,  
> but that was their goal.


The specific problem is simply how it walks the directory tree.   
File::Find has historically needed to be especially parsimonious of  
file/directory descriptors for maximum portability (who else here  
remembers when NFILE was 20?), which alters the way it traverses the  
filesystem in ways that may well reduce kernel-level contention and  
resources.  I think the other find variants all assume lots of per- 
process file descriptors and hold lots of directories open as they go  
(I may be wrong, though).

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH



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