Re: /gnu/store/.links/

[Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl>]

On Fri, Feb 09, 2018 at 01:11:23PM +0100, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> 
> Hi Pjotr,
> 
> > What is
> >
> >   ls -1 /gnu/store/.links/|wc -l
> >   495938
> >
> > Never saw it before. Does this scale?
> 
> It’s used for optional file deduplication.  It is enabled by default,
> but you can disable it with a daemon option on file systems that
> deduplicate data at the block level.

Hmmm. I think this is better handled at the file system level if
people want deduplication. These systems will be more common.

> I don’t know about scalability.  This number is still well below the
> limits of ext4 file systems, but accessing a big directory listing like
> that can be slow.  I would feel a little better about this if we split
> it up into different prefix directories (like it’s done for browser
> caches).  I don’t think it’s necessary, though.

For ext4 it is going to be an issue. Anyway, we'll see what happens.
Thanks for explaining.

Pj.