Nicolas Dichtel and Thierry Herbelot pointed out that the directories in the/proc filesystem used a linked list to identify their files. But, this would be slow when /proc directories started having lots of files, which, for example, might happen when the system needed lots of network sockets.
Nicolas and Thierry posted a patch to change the /proc implementation to use multiple linked lists instead of just one. Each subdirectory would have its own linked list, keyed to a hash of the directory’s name. According to their benchmarks, the patch shaved 1/5 of the time needed to churn through all the entries of a given subdirectory.
Read more at Linux Journal.
