Comment by stabbles
20 hours ago
> Zip with no compression is a nice contender for a container format that shouldn't be slept on
SquashFS with zstd compression is used by various container runtimes, and is popular in HPC where filesystems often have high latency. It can be mounted natively or with FUSE, and the decompression overhead is not really felt.
Just make sure you mount the squashfs with —direct-io or else you will be double caching (caching the sqfs pages, and caching the uncompressed files within the sqfs). I have no idea why this isn’t the default. Found this out the hard way.
Wouldn't you still have a lot of syscalls?
Yes, but with much lower latency. The squashfs file ensures the files are close together and you benefit from fs cache a lot.
You then use io_uring