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Traditional UNIX filesystems use inodes to reference file data held in disk blocks. As files are added and deleted from the filesystem over time, it becomes increasingly unlikely that a file can be allocated a contiguous number of blocks on the disk. This is especially true if a file grows slowly over time as blocks following its present last block will probably become allocated to other files. To read such a file may require many head seek movements and consequently take a much longer time time than if its blocks were written one after another on the disk.
AFS, EAFS, and HTFS filesystems try to allocate disk blocks to files in clusters to overcome fragmentation of the filesystem. Fragmentation becomes more serious as the number of unallocated (free) disk blocks decreases. Filesystems that are more than 90% full are almost certainly fragmented. To defragment a filesystem archive its contents to tape or a spare disk, delete the filesystem and then restore it.
On inode-based filesystems, large files are represented using single, double, and even triple indirection. In single indirection, a filesystem block referenced by an inode holds references to other blocks that contain data. In double and triple indirection, there are respectively one and two intermediate levels of indirect blocks containing references to further blocks. A file that is larger than 10 filesystem blocks (10KB) requires several disk operations to update its inode structure, indirect blocks, and data blocks.
Directories are searched as lists so that the average time to find a directory entry initially increases in direct proportion to the total number of entries. The blocks that a directory uses to store its entries are referenced from its inode. Searching for a directory entry therefore becomes slower when indirect blocks have to be accessed. The first 10 direct data blocks can hold 640 14-character filename entries. The namei cache can overcome some of the overhead that would result from searching large directories. It does this by providing efficient translation of name to inode number for commonly-accessed pathname components.
You can increase the performance of HTFS filesystems by disabling checkpointing and transaction intent logging. To do this for an HTFS root filesystem, use the Hardware/Kernel Manager or configure(ADM) to set the values of the kernel parameters ROOTCHKPT and ROOTLOG to 0. Then relink the kernel and reboot the system. For other HTFS filesystems, use the Filesystem Manager to specify no logging and no checkpointing or use the -onolog,nochkpt option modifiers with mount(ADM). The disadvantage of disabling checkpointing and logging is that it makes the filesystem metadata more susceptible to being corrupted and potentially unrecoverable in the case of a system crash. Full filesystem checking using fsck(ADM) will also take considerably longer.
For more information on these subjects see
``Maintaining filesystem efficiency''
and
``How the namei cache works''.