Hello, Here is a second version of my mballoc improvements to avoid spreading allocations with mb_optimize_scan=1. The patches fix the performance regression I was able to reproduce with reaim on my test machine: mb_optimize_scan=0 mb_optimize_scan=1 patched Hmean disk-1 2076.12 ( 0.00%) 2099.37 ( 1.12%) 2032.52 ( -2.10%) Hmean disk-41 92481.20 ( 0.00%) 83787.47 * -9.40%* 90308.37 ( -2.35%) Hmean disk-81 155073.39 ( 0.00%) 135527.05 * -12.60%* 154285.71 ( -0.51%) Hmean disk-121 185109.64 ( 0.00%) 166284.93 * -10.17%* 185298.62 ( 0.10%) Hmean disk-161 229890.53 ( 0.00%) 207563.39 * -9.71%* 232883.32 * 1.30%* Hmean disk-201 223333.33 ( 0.00%) 203235.59 * -9.00%* 221446.93 ( -0.84%) Hmean disk-241 235735.25 ( 0.00%) 217705.51 * -7.65%* 239483.27 * 1.59%* Hmean disk-281 266772.15 ( 0.00%) 241132.72 * -9.61%* 263108.62 ( -1.37%) Hmean disk-321 265435.50 ( 0.00%) 245412.84 * -7.54%* 267277.27 ( 0.69%) The changes also significanly reduce spreading of allocations for small / moderately sized files. I'm not able to measure a performance difference resulting from this but on eMMC storage this seems to be the main culprit of reduced performance. Untarring of raspberry-pi archive touches following numbers of groups: mb_optimize_scan=0 mb_optimize_scan=1 patched groups 4 22 7 To achieve this I have added two more changes on top of v1 - patches 4 and 5. Patch 4 makes sure we use locality group preallocation even for files that are not likely to grow anymore (previously we have disabled all preallocations for such files, however locality group preallocation still makes a lot of sense for such files). This patch reduced spread of a small file allocations but larger file allocations were still spread significantly because they avoid locality group preallocation and as they are not power-of-two in size, they also immediately start with cr=1 scan. To address that I've changed the data structure for looking up the best block group to allocate from (see patch 5 for details). Stefan, can you please test whether these patches fix the problem for you as well? Comments & review welcome. Honza Previous versions: Link: http://lore.kernel.org/r/20220823134508.27854-1-jack@xxxxxxx # v1