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

[Seth Mos <knuffie@xs4all.nl>]

At 15:32 23-8-2001 +0800, Federico Sevilla III wrote:
>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.

On a XFS filesystem you can only allocate 50% of the space as inodes by 
default. If you have a large filessytem it will take you a longer time to 
reach it. See the mkfs.xfs manpage for creating a higher maximum inodes limit.

Cheers


>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.
>GnuPG Key: <http://jijo.leathercollection.ph/jijo.gpg>

--
Seth
Every program has two purposes one for which
it was written and another for which it wasn't
I use the last kind.