Strange fragmentation in nearly empty filesystem

[Felix Blyakher]

On Jan 27, 2009, at 8:37 AM, Carsten Oberscheid wrote:

> Just out of couriosity (and stubbornness): Are there any XFS
> parameters that might influence fragmentation for the better, in case
> I have to put up with a stupid application?

Not much could be tuned in XFS for random writes over the holes.
Ideally such file should be preallocated. Can you provide
vmware the zero filled file by doing

dd if=/dev/zero of=foo.mem count=512 bs=1024k

instead of letting vmware populate it over the time and thus
badly fragmenting it.

Felix