On 10/23/2013 2:03 AM, David Brown wrote: > On the other hand, he is also serving 100+ freenx desktop users. As far > as I understand it (and I'm very happy for corrections if I'm wrong), > that will mean a /home directory with 100+ sub-directories for the > different users - and that /is/ one of the ideal cases for concat+XFS > parallelism. No, it is /not/. Homedir storage is not an ideal use case. It's not even in the ballpark. There's simply not enough parallelism nor IOPS involved, and file sizes can vary substantially, so the workload is not deterministic, i.e. it is "general". Recall I said in my last reply that this "is a very workload specific storage architecture"? Workloads that benefit from XFS over concatenated disks are those that: 1. Expose inherent limitations and/or inefficiencies of striping, at the filesystem, elevator, and/or hardware level 2. Exhibit a high degree of directory level parallelism 3. Exhibit high IOPS or data rates 4. Most importantly, exhibit relatively deterministic IO patterns Typical homedir storage meets none of these criteria. Homedir files on a GUI desktop terminal server are not 'typical', but the TS workload doesn't meet these criteria either. -- Stan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html