03-07-13, 04:24 PM
(03-07-13, 04:12 PM)Dead Eye link Wrote: Its more to do with where the data is stored on the hard drive (fragmentation)
Lots of tiny pieces of data (each post for example) requires a different read request if its not stored exactly next to another piece being requested (which is unlikely). Therefore you need an HDD with a very amount of IOPS more than transfer rates. This is where RAID arrays and SSDs come in to increase performance and yield higher IOPS to the OS / Applications
Its worth noting that having all the avatars in a single directory isn't going to make any difference to data fragmentation unless I'm missing something.
You only get fragmentation when you're deleting/overwriting data, if you're only adding it (which will mainly be the case on a forum) you shouldn't see much apart from possibly on the database files. On a unix box with ext3/4 you'll get virtually no fragmentation anyway. I don't believe fragmentation is much of a problem except in windows fat/fat32/NTFS environments. In conclusion I don't think fragmentation is an issue at all but we're all welcome to our opinions and I could be wrong.
Damn... I'm replying when I said I wouldn't. I could argue at length with you on the pros and cons of RAID0/5/6 etc but it's all environment/hardware specific so it'd all be guessing and when we don't know the set-up it's impossible and pointless to say. If a SMF forum needs a RAID array or SSD then you'd better be running the Ubuntu forums otherwise it's a hell of a spec machine just to run some php and mysql to post up some images.
Maybe you're right, maybe I'm wrong. Dunno.
Opinions are like A**holes, Everyone has one. Some people seem to have more than one though which is a bit odd.