Keith Bainbridge composed on 2024-02-17 15:44 (UTC+1100):
Yes the / partitions are btrfs
Several years ago, I installed Debian (9?) using btrfs for root (and
boot?). I failed to understand that btrfs required regular maintenance
and/or I was too lazy to figure it out and do it. After a few months,
the systems started running slowly and I seem to recall conflicting
reports of storage usage. I STFW, RTFM, etc., and tried doing the
maintenance by hand. I quickly came to the conclusion that I needed to
run `btrfs balance start ...` many, many times. So, I wrote Perl script
and let it hammer on the file systems for hours at a time (!). I was
able to rescue most of the disks to decent performance, but one was
especially bad and I was only able to rescue it to marginal performance.
I continued running btrfs for a while and running the Perl script
periodically. Ultimatedly, I backed up, put in fresh OS disks, and
installed using ext4. This was one of my reasons to use FreeBSD and ZFS
for my SOHO servers.
David
