tuning linux cache settings for inode caching

I am dealing with hundred million files in a filesystem (distributed among a lot of subdirectories), and I need to be able to list them very quickly, particularly in order to rsync them efficiently.

On a other hand, I don't really need to have the actual content of the file kept in cache.

I am constantly adding and removing files, but not that frequently (something like ten times per second).

Is there a way I can tell the OS (2.6.18-194.el5) to use the 24GB available RAM more on inode caching than on file caching? I already looked at /proc/etc/vm/vfs_cache_pressure but it doesn't seem to be exactly what I am looking for...

Solution 1:

How about lowering the value for vfs_cache_pressure? According to Documentation for /proc/sys/vm/* this should do what you want:

vfs_cache_pressure

This percentage value controls the tendency of the kernel to reclaim the memory which is used for caching of directory and inode objects.

At the default value of vfs_cache_pressure=100 the kernel will attempt to reclaim dentries and inodes at a "fair" rate with respect to pagecache and swapcache reclaim. Decreasing vfs_cache_pressure causes the kernel to prefer to retain dentry and inode caches. When vfs_cache_pressure=0, the kernel will never reclaim dentries and inodes due to memory pressure and this can easily lead to out-of-memory conditions. Increasing vfs_cache_pressure beyond 100 causes the kernel to prefer to reclaim dentries and inodes.

Increasing vfs_cache_pressure significantly beyond 100 may have negative performance impact. Reclaim code needs to take various locks to find freeable directory and inode objects. With vfs_cache_pressure=1000, it will look for ten times more freeable objects than there are.

Solution 2:

you can use these 2 commands to do the same job.

Updatedb (to update the list of file and folders location in whole drive)

locate / (to list all files in the whole OS, which is lightening fast as it picks them up from the Database)