[Tfug] An Ext4 question...

[Zack Williams]

>> Does anybody know what happens when you stash a huge number of tiny
>> files in Ext4?  Does it store them efficiently the way ReiserFS does?
>
> ext4 doesn't do block suballocation like reiserfs.

btrfs does, but is still being developed - http://lwn.net/Articles/342892/

>> I ask because I'm running into limitations on mailbox sized with
>> Thunderbird and MBox, and was considering jumping to something based
>> on MailDir, which as far as I can tell has bigger mailbox limits than
>> MBox.  But given MailDir's approach of one file per message, block
>> size issues will get really wild'n'wooly unless Ext4 handles that
>> better.

How big of mailboxes are you talking about?  (disk size/# of messages)

Any reason this machine needs to be running linux particularly?   UFS
on most BSD's has fragment support (stores multiple small files in one
block), and OpenSolaris + ZFS works well with small files - you could
make a filesystem for just your mail stores and give it a small
recordsize (roughly equivalent to block size in other FS's)

- Zack