As it turns out, the solution to dealing with Jekyll for local development on a blog involving huge numbers of tiny files is non-trivial. Why? Because Jekyll itself, when you run the local server, will copy out every single individual post into a tiny file of its own. So, clearly when you are running your local development server, a bad problem of thousands of tiny files is going to become a worse one. What is the way out of this? Clearly, any solution must be improved efficiency at the filesystem level.
So, I am going to propose this potential solution to the problem,
though I haven’t tested it yet: compressed RAM disk filesystem. On
Linux, this means using the zram module. The idea is that you can
reasonably deal with filesystem fragmentation causing padding out to 4
KB if you can compress the filesystem: assuming all of that extra
padded wasted space is all zeros, this will compress to be a sparse
coding format, hence solving your problem of wasted space with
thousands of tiny files. Again, I haven’t tested this yet, so time
will tell if this works well for me or not.
20180527/DuckDuckGo linux ram compressed file system
20180527/DuckDuckGo linux compressed ramdisk
20180527/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram