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Comment by preseinger | Hacker News Reader

> The intuition here is that directories are a shared resource for their direct children and must therefore serialize concurrent directory-modifying operations, causing contention.

why do you think this is true?

i've never heard of anything like it

directories are inodes on a file system, they are in no way "shared resources for their direct children", and there is no concept of a "directory-modifying operation" which contends with operations on any file (or directory) which is a "child" (subdir, sub-file) of that directory

your claim is totally bizarre to me, afaik it's nonsensical, but i guess i could be mistaken

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A directory is a file like anything else that contains a map of names to inodes. If you're trying to add or remove mappings (create or delete files), then clearly some synchronization must occur or the contents of the file will contain garbage. In theory you could get away with a very small critical section that says "lock bytes N through M" of the file, but then how do you deal with disk block alignment (i.e. two pairs of n-m bytes are on the same disk block, so they need to take turns anyway) and how do you deal with I/O errors (the first n-m bytes fail, but the second n-m succeed, now you have a hole with garbage).

Also no need to theorize: run the benchmark I linked for yourself. It clearly shows a massive advantage to having each thread work with its own directory.

1. your benchmarks exercise a very narrow set of use cases

2. the overhead of modifying the dirent is statistically zero compared to the costs related to manipulating the files on disk

No. Run the benchmark on a tmpfs:

$ hyperfine --warmup 3 -N "./test /dev/shm 8 zip" "./test /dev/shm 8 chain" Benchmark 1: ./test /dev/shm 8 zip Time (mean ± σ): 118.5 ms ± 11.6 ms [User: 92.9 ms, System: 726.6 ms] Range (min … max): 103.6 ms … 143.4 ms 23 runs

Benchmark 2: ./test /dev/shm 8 chain Time (mean ± σ): 235.7 ms ± 11.0 ms [User: 116.4 ms, System: 1537.7 ms] Range (min … max): 220.1 ms … 258.3 ms 13 runs

Summary './test /dev/shm 8 zip' ran 1.99 ± 0.22 times faster than './test /dev/shm 8 chain'

do you know what a tmpfs is? or what these programs are actually exercising?

i mean ignore me if you want, no skin off my back

but you're not benchmarking what you think you're benchmarking

> A directory is a file like anything else that contains a map of names to inodes. If you're trying to add or remove mappings (create or delete files), then clearly some synchronization must occur or the contents of the file will contain garbage.

this synchronization is handled for you by the fs, specifically the fs cache

inode alignment and errors are managed by this intermediating layer

your benchmarks are not demonstrating what you think they are demonstrating

Except they are and your claims are trivial to disprove: simply run the benchmarks under perf. You'll find that most of the time is spent on the rwsem which is described here onwards: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/path-look...

your benchmarks use O_DIRECT, which bypasses the fs cache

the fs cache does most/all of the optimizations you're doing manually

bypassing the fs cache is highly atypical for user-space code

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