[Lustre-discuss] performance: hard vs. soft links

[Michael Kluge]

> Hard links are only directory entries with refcounts on the target inode, so that when the last link to an inode is removed the inode will be deleted.
>
> Symlinks are inodes with a string that points to the original name. They are not recounted on the target, but require a new inode to be allocated for each one.
>
> It isn't obvious which one would be slower, since they both have some overhead.
>
> Is your sample size large enough?  1000 may only take 1s to complete and may not provide consistent results.

The 1000 creates need  between 2.9 and 3.0 s (3 runs) for the hard links 
and 2.2-2.3 s (3 runs as well) for the soft links. I think the numbers 
are "not so bad" in terms of accuracy. Thanks for the explanation.


Michael