Many small files instead of one large files - writing, wearing, mount-time?

[Artem B. Bityuckiy]

On Tue, 2005-03-08 at 09:59 +0100, Martin Egholm Nielsen wrote:
> Hi there,
Hello

> Hence, me initial strategy was to have a file in NAND for each resource. 
> However, I noticed that mount-time increased "severely" when many files 
> were put on the device, and doing an "ls" first time on the 
> device/directory took lots of time as well.
Owing to its design JFFS2 works extremely slowly wit directories
containing so many files.

> Unfortunately low mount-time is one of the factors giving the user a 
> good experience with the system, so I started considering another 
> strategy - namely one large file to hold all these states.
> 
> However, I'm a bit concerned how fopen( ..., "rw" ) is handled 
> underneith when I flush/sync the filedescriptor if I only mess with a 
> small part of the file. Is the entire file flushed to NAND once more, or 
> does Linux+JFFS2 handle this, and only write the parts (inodes) that are 
> affected...
Don't worry, Only that "messed" peace will be flushed. The "large file"
solution will be definitely faster.

-- 
Best Regards,
Artem B. Bityuckiy,
St.-Petersburg, Russia.