Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> Seems like it's the same amount of work to me, whether the kernel does 
>> it or the application does it.
> 
> First, you've eliminated all the overhead of two kernel calls per file, 
> which is something like 30% of a typical process' costs of execution.

...are you serious??! o_O

You're telling me an I/O-bound process is slowed down by the mere act of 
changing CPU mode? I thought that stuff was more or less instant!

>>> To be fair, NTFS and other tree-based directory systems have to 
>>> rework the tree when you delete the files, so this too will be disk 
>>> I/O overhead.
>>
>> Um... you don't cache directory blocks, no? (Especially given that 
>> they're usually non-contiguous and so take a lot of thrashing to 
>> access, and there often heavily accessed.)
> 
> Sure. When your directory is bigger than your RAM, that doesn't help a 
> whole lot.

Well, true, but a directory entry is about 12 bytes, so you'd need to be 
deleting several *thousand million* files, not just 3,000.

>> $500 seems like a hell of a lot of money to me...
> 
> Not for a business.

Well, no... not if it's for something important anyway.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
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