I read a kerneltrap post (http://kerneltrap.org/node/4462) stating the
NFS Inode cache in the 2.4 kernel has performance issues when it gets
too full it causes a great deal of hash collisions, and is a
performance issue. I briefly traced the inode lookup code in the 2.4
kernel and found that it seems to have a number of hash buckets, and
perform external chaining to handle collisions. I'm using a 2.6
kernel, and performing a high-performance parallelized directory walk,
resulting in my kernel's slab allocator using 3GB of RAM for the NFS
inode cache, and the dentry cache. I have some concerns that I might
be affected by a similar performance problem. I briefly traced the
2.6 kernel's inode lookup function, and found that it seems to use a
proper hashtable (but I neither have personal knowledge of the table's
algorithm, nor do I have time, unfortunately, to investigate).

If anyone has any information on this topic cached, I'd be
appreciative if it could be shared.

thanks,
Friendly Anonymous Poster