Can somebody explain this? du & ls showing different sizes

[Vijay Gill]

2009/2/16 Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan at gmail.com>:
> On Sun, 2009-02-15 at 23:45 +0000, Vijay Gill wrote:
>>  > That could be because you're using XFS.
>> >
>> > poc
> [...]
>> Thanks but how does that statement explain the behaviour I am seeing?
>
> I'm reaching here, but since XFS uses allocation strategies different
> from the more familiar ext3 system, I wondered if 'du' could in some
> circumstances report larger numbers than "normal".
>
> Apologies if I'm raving.
>
> poc
>
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You are spot on Pat. XFS allws you to pre-allocate contiguous area of
disk for a file when it is opened for writing data. This is determined
by allocsize parameter during mount and is used foe reducing
fragmentation(fragmentation in Linux? yes siree, it does happen in
Linux too).

In my case I have provided 1M which is far much less than 512M which
XFS is pre-allocating. This is what caught my eye.

Cheers
Vijay