ext3 usage guidance
T. Horsnell
tsh at mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk
Wed Mar 28 17:47:32 UTC 2007
Is there a document anywhere offering guidance on the optimum
use of ext3 filesystems? Googling shows nothing useful and the
Linux ext3 FAQ is not very forthcoming.
I'm particularly interested in:
1. The effect on performance of large numbers of (generally) small files
One of my ext3 filesystems has 750K files on a 36GB disk, and
backup with tar takes forever. Even 'find /fs -type f -ls'
to establish ownership of the various files takes some hours.
Are there thresholds for #files-per-directory or #total-files-per-filesystem
beyond which performance degrades rapidly?
2. I have a number of filesystems on SCSI disks which I would
like to fsck on demand, rather than have an unscheduled
fsck at reboot because some mount-count has expired.
I use 'tune2fs -c 0 and -t 0' to do this, and would like
to use 'shutdown -F -r 'at a chosen time to force fsck on
reboot, and I'd then like fsck to do things in parallel.
What are the resources (memory etc) required for parallel
fsck'ing? Can I reasonably expect to be able to fsck say,
50 300GB filesystems in parallel, or should I group them into
smaller groups? How small?
Thanks,
Terry.
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