On May 27,  5:07am, Graeme Tait wrote:
} Subject: Re: File system gets too fragmented ???

} I've received several answers along this direction, but I want to emphasize 
one 
} point that I think is being overlooked. When the filesystem is fresh and a 
new 
} archive is expanded to create ~900,000 small files each of 2-5 512 byte frags 
} in size, the filesystem appears quite well-behaved, and space seems to be 
} efficiently utilized.
} 
} The problem seems to be that with successive updates that slightly change the 
} size of files, or add or delete files, that a large number of unallocated 
} fragments are created.
} 
} I don't understand how the FFS stores files of sub-block size. Do the 
fragments 
} used need to be contiguous, or entirely within a single block?

Yes and yes.

} The choice of 512 byte frags is based on average wastage per file of half a 
} frag, or about 230MB with 900,000 files. It's quite possible that a 2k 
frag/16k 
} blocksize would improve utilization of fragments, as the vast majority of 
files 
} would then fit in a single fragment, but in this case there would be of order 
} 800MB wastage, and the files would not fit the existing disk.

You might try unmounting the filesystem and doing
        tunefs -o space /dev/rawdevice
(which can also be done at newfs time).  You may find that the
performance, especially write performance, isn't too good.


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