hpc / hpc/mpifileutils

libmfu: Develop cache file format using variable length fields

Open
#51 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
C
Stars
200
Forks
85
Avg merge
3d 21h
Merged PRs (30d)
2

Description

The current cache file format uses fixed length records. It encodes the full path to each file, and to produce a fixed length field, it uses the longest path name of any file. So when writing the cache file for a large number of files in which there may be a really long file name, the output file size is inflated.

To conserve space, let's store this using variable length records. To support that efficiently, we'll either need a table in the header describing the offset of each record, or we'll need to add some end-of-record marker between records.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating the libmfu cache file implementation and reading how its fixed-length records and full paths are written and read. Decide whether a header offset table or end-of-record markers fit the existing format; done means variable-length records conserve space while remaining readable by the cache logic.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
c
Domain
tooling
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.