From: Dan Nelson
Date: October 9 2006 3:12pm
Subject: Re: InnoDB, 1 file per table or 1 BIG table?
List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/202453
Message-Id: <20061009151248.GC65659@dan.emsphone.com>
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In the last episode (Oct 09), Ow Mun Heng said:
> Just wanted to know if it would be faster/better to implement this
> option into my.cnf
> 
> innodb_file_per_table = 1 
> 
> which would essentially make each table a file on it's own rather
> than have it all in 1 file. My belief is that it would be slightly
> more advantageous compared to 1 BIG file.
> 
> eg: 1 10GB file would perform poorer than 10 1GB files. 
> 
> Is this statement true and how far is is true?

I don't think that the number of files has any impact on query speed.
The advantage file-per-table gives you is the ability to recover unused
space easily by running OPTIMIZE TABLE.  With a single tablespace, the
only way to recover space is to dump all the tables, delete all the
tablespace files, and reload.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@stripped