From: Linus Torvalds Date: Mon, 08 May 2006 02:42:44 GMT Subject: Re: Unresolved issues #2 (shallow clone again) Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <20060508022432.GA26076@thunk.org> On Sun, 7 May 2006, Theodore Tso wrote: > > That brings up an interesting question though --- why not skip > compressing files that are under 4k (or whatever the filesystem > blocksize happens to be) if they are unpacked? It burns CPU time; > maybe not enough to be human-noticeable, but it's still not buying you > anything. Well, other filesystems don't have 4kB issues. Reiser can do smaller things iirc, and you might obviously have a ext3 filesystem with a 1kB blocksize too. And with tails on FFS, you might have a filesystem with a 8kB blocksize, but despite that it might lay out <1kB files well. Anyway, packing makes all this basically a non-issue. There are no block boundaries in a pack-file, and you only use a single inode. And you'd obviously want to pack for other reasons anyway (ie the delta compression will makea huge difference over time). Linus