Centralized summary as a way to speed up "ls" time

Hello Ferenc,

While using JFFS2 on NAND devices with large size and many files I faced the problem of very slow "ls" performance. On folder which contains ~40 files and ~80MB ls could take ~25sec!

I'm thinking of the way to resolve somehow this issue.
Reasons of the very slow performance are more or less clean - JFFS2 scans NAND to fill jffs2_node_frag and jffs2_full_dnode structures. After first call of ls on some dir this data will be filled and next call will work fast.
If we have few RAM cache may be released and next ls will take long.

The question I have will it be possible to extend a little bit functionality of Centralized Summary to story these nodes as well. Do you see any technical issues here?

IMHO if it is possible it make sense, because it will load node info into RAM for the most used data. So for most used data we will have preloaded node info fast "ls" just after mount.

Do you have any updates of CS? Is the last version of CS placed here www.inf.u-szeged.hu/jffs2/mount.php?

Thanks,
Alexey

One way could be to introduce an aggregated dentry node which would store several, say 32 direntries together, instead of having per-direntry node.

Best regards,
Artem Bityutskiy (Битюцкий Артём)

Hi Alexey,

Now we have thought it over, and there is no big technical problem in extending Centralized Summary for storing these (frag tree) nodes as well.

We see two technical things:
- it is not sure that after an "ls" the these trees are staying in memory for ever - so saving only the exiting trees may not cause always speedup
- it can increase the summary information by (in worst case) about 100%.

Yes, this is the last version. To update this for the latest MTD version can be a little bit big effort - many thing has been changed.

Ferenc