Ext3 users - Apr 2003 - Directory size expansion and contraction in ext3

Hello all,
              I was running the following script in the directory $(HOME)/temp

while true
do
      touch $((i = i + 1))
done

I found at the end when the inode limit was reached, the size of the temp 
directory had increased from 4096 to 2162688.

Once i removed all the files in directory temp. I expected the directory 
size to go back to 4096. But its still staying at 2162688. Is this a 
feature or a bug?


pls cc me back to romit@myrealbox.com
i am not subscribed to ext3 mailing list.

Regards,
-Romit

On Mon, Apr 28, 2003 at 05:05:30PM +0800, Romit wrote:
> Hello all,
>              I was running the following script in the directory 
>              $(HOME)/temp
> 
> while true
> do
>      touch $((i = i + 1))
> done
> 
> I found at the end when the inode limit was reached, the size of the temp 
> directory had increased from 4096 to 2162688.
> 
> Once i removed all the files in directory temp. I expected the directory 
> size to go back to 4096. But its still staying at 2162688. Is this a 
> feature or a bug?
Neither, it's just the way things are.  In practice this sort of thing
isn't a real problem for most systems, and fixing it can be a real
pain to get right, so historically most Unix filesystems have not
bothered to try to compact/compress directories.  ext2/3 is no
different.

One could easily argue that this would be a nice feature to add, and
perhaps some day we might add it.  But it's pretty low on the priority
list.


					- Ted