UFS: The Root of All Evil 279Unfortunately, the whole underlying design of the Unix file system—direc-
tories that are virtually content free, inodes that lack filenames, and files
with their contents spread across the horizion—places an ultimate limit on
how efficient any POSIX-compliant file system can ever be. Researchers
experimenting with Sprite and other file systems report performance that is
50% to 80% faster than UFS, FFS, or any other file system that implements
the Unix standard. Because these file systems don’t, they’ll likely stay in
the research lab.
Date: Tue, 7 May 1991 10:22:23 PDT
From: Stanley’s Tool Works <[email protected]>
Subject: How do you spell “efficient?”
To: UNIX-HATERSConsider that Unix was built on the idea of processing files. Consider
that Unix weenies spend an inordinate amount of time micro-opti-
mizing code. Consider how they rant and rave at the mere mention of
inefficient tools like a garbage collector. Then consider this, from an
announcement of a recent talk here:...We have implemented a prototype log-structured file system
called Sprite LFS; it outperforms current Unix file systems by
an order of magnitude for small-file writes while matching or
exceeding Unix performance for reads and large writes. Even
when the overhead for cleaning is included, Sprite LFS can use
70% of the disk bandwidth for writing, whereas Unix file
systems typically can use only 5-10%.—smLSo why do people believe that the Unix file system is high performance?
Because Berkeley named their file system “The Fast File System.” Well, it
was faster than the original file system that Thompson and Ritchie had
written.