ext3 efficiency, larger vs smaller file system, lots of inodes...

[Joe Armstrong <jarmstrong postpath com>]

(... to Nabble Ext3:Users - reposted by me after I joined the ext3-users mailing list - sorry for the dup...)

A bit of a rambling subject there but I am trying to figure out if it is more efficient at runtime to have few very large file systems (8 TB) vs a larger number of smaller file systems.  The file systems will hold many small files.

My preference is to have a larger number of smaller file systems for faster recovery and less impact if a problem does occur, but I was wondering if anybody had information from a runtime performance perspective  - is there a difference between few large and many small file systems ?  Is memory consumption higher for the inode tables if there are more small ones vs one really large one ?

Also, does anybody have a reasonable formula for calculating memory requirements of a given file system ?

Thanks.
Joe