Re: /gnu/store/.links/

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Pjotr,

> What is
>
>   ls -1 /gnu/store/.links/|wc -l
>   495938
>
> Never saw it before. Does this scale?

It’s used for optional file deduplication.  It is enabled by default,
but you can disable it with a daemon option on file systems that
deduplicate data at the block level.

I don’t know about scalability.  This number is still well below the
limits of ext4 file systems, but accessing a big directory listing like
that can be slow.  I would feel a little better about this if we split
it up into different prefix directories (like it’s done for browser
caches).  I don’t think it’s necessary, though.

--
Ricardo

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