[RFC,PATCH 0/4] Dynamic Pseudo Root

[Tom Haynes]

Steve Dickson wrote:
>
> A concern I have with this implement, is how scalable it is? Do server 
> export hundreds or even thousands of directories? I don't know...  If they do, 
> then creating a mount point for each export probably will not scale very well. 
>   

When Linux pulls in zfs (if ever), then this will be a reality. Look at 
http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/nfs_zfs.html:

> Until Solaris ZFS was installed on the file server, it had about 12 
> exports. One week before the home directories were migrated totally to 
> ZFS, the server had about 300 exports. Right after the migration, it 
> had about 1300 exports. The server currently has about 1500 exports.
>
> And the Sun NFS team started seeing a serious impact on the loading of 
> shares at boot time. As previously mentioned, a design originally made 
> to handle 10 exports -- even one that was redesigned 10 years ago -- 
> does not scale well when going to 1500 exports. And Sun has customers 
> that report going to 15,000 exports.
>

And those are numbers that NetApp's Data ONTAP was able to handle 2 
years ago.

E.g., you should expect those types of exports to happen sooner than 
later in Linux...