TIP: Taking advantage of Reiser4 speed without risk

[Lowspirit]

Intro
This might be limited to a select few that might find this even remotely interesting but here it goes anyways, and as always, if somehow you manage to make something go boom I take no responsibility, I don't see how you'd manage to do that but still, this is my disclaimer.

This TIP doesn't go into how to create a reiser4 partition or how to make symlinks etc, I assume you know how to do this and information on how to do all that are available elsewhere alot better written then I ever could.

Taking advantage of Reiser4 speed without risking important data
Gaining some extra performance for speed freaks

What I've done basically is take a separate small 20GB harddrive (which btw used to be my Windows harddrive) and made it into a reiser4 partition using latest mm-sources that include reiser4 support, and I use this drive for various operations that use many small files because this is where Reiser4 shines speed wise, this way if it were to explode I loose no data of value.


So what directories can we put on it
Anything that uses tons of small files, so this is what I got so far :

Portage tree /usr/portage
This is just the beginning but so far I use it for my portage tree ofcourse, and that together with my rsync_excludes that removes games-* and such, doing a tree sync is now an operation that takes under a minute.

Gnome .thumbnail directory /home/user/.thumbnails
This is where Gnome stores all it's tiny .png thumbnails, and again, I noticed a big difference, I have a directory with tons of trailers and it usually takes a while to open this directory because of all the thumbnails but with the .thumbnail directory moved and symlinked to my reiser4 harddrive, the time to open it got cut in half.

Firefox Cache directory /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/randomprofile/Cache
You can change this directory in your about:config by adding "browser.cache.disk.parent_directory" string and make the value your new location on your reiser4 drive, if you make it /mnt/reiserdrive/firefox it'll make a Cache directory in there and store all your cache there.

The End
That's about it, if you have issues with this, tips for additions or errors, please post and i'll make corrections, I'm really no authority in this it's just something that have grown into something that I thought I'd share, thanks.
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Gentoo | AMD X2 3800+ 2GB RAM | Kernel 2.6.30 . ReiserFS . CFQ . GCC4.3.3 | Firefox 3.5 | Gnome 2.26 w/ Compiz-Fusion
"Penguins are the only fish that can fly"