XFS and inodes (was: Recommendation on stable Reiserfs+NFS setup)

[Federico Sevilla III <jijo@leathercollection.ph>]

Martin,
(cc XFS Mailing List)

On Thu, 23 Aug 2001 at 09:11, Martin Apel wrote:
> There's one drawback using XFS instead of ReiserFS. You have to fix
> the number of available i-nodes at FS-creation time. A few times in
> the past I had too few i-nodes on a filesystem which was otherwise
> still not full, so I had to copy all data somewhere else, reformat,
> and copy back. This is something I would like to avoid.

This is interesting. I have not handled filesystems as large as yours, but
have always been under the impression that XFS on Linux preallocates
inodes based on need (on-demand). Perhaps one limiting factor, though,
could be the maximum percentage of the space to be allocated for inodes
defined when the filesystem is made.

I'm sending a copy of this reply to the XFS mailing list, though, so that
the experts there can help us both clarify this issue on maximum inodes.

> Apart from that we have a few volumes with very many small files which
> have to be exported via NFS. ReiserFS is probably a better choice for
> these filesystems. But I anyway I will have a closer look at XFS.

Wrong. ReiserFS is _better_ for those many small files. On the other hand
XFS is great as the file size increases, and you will see this trend even
on the benchmarks done by the ReiserFS team.

 --> Jijo

--
Federico Sevilla III  :: jijo@leathercollection.ph
Network Administrator :: The Leather Collection, Inc.
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