On 05/19/2009 12:28 PM, Joe Armstrong wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Sandeen [mailto:sandeen@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2009 9:21 AM
To: Joe Armstrong
Cc: ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: ext3 efficiency, larger vs smaller file system, lots of inodes...
Joe Armstrong wrote:
(... 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 ?
It's the vfs that caches dentries& inodes; whether they come from
multiple filesystems or one should not change matters significantly.
The other downside to multiple smaller filesystems is space management,
when you wind up with half of them full and half of them empty, it may
be hard to rearrange.
But the extra granularity for better availability and fsck/recovery time
may be well worth it. It probably depends on what your application is
doing and how it can manage the space. You might want to test filling
an 8T filesystem and see for yourself how long fsck will take... it'll
be a while. Perhaps a very long while. :)
Also, does anybody have a reasonable formula for calculating memory
requirements of a given file system ?
Probably the largest memory footprint will be the cached dentries&
inodes, though this is a "soft" requirement since it's mostly just cached.
Each journal probably has a bit of memory requirement overhead, but I
doubt it'll be a significant factor in your decision unless every byte
is at a premium...
-Eric
How you do this also depends on the type of storage you use. If you have
multiple file systems on one physical disk (say 2 1TB partitions on a 2TB S-ATA
disk), you need to be careful not to bash on both file systems at once since you
will thrash the disk heads.
In general, it is less of an issue with arrays, but still can have a performance
impact.
Ric
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