On Sat, 7 Jan 2012, Jim Klimov wrote:
I understand that relatively high fragmentation is inherent to ZFS due to its COW and possible intermixing of metadata and data blocks (of which metadata path blocks are likely to expire and get freed relatively quickly).
To put things in proper perspective, with 128K filesystem blocks, the worst case file fragmentation as a percentage is 0.39% (100*1/((128*1024)/512)). On a Microsoft Windows system, the defragger might suggest that defragmentation is not warranted for this percentage level.
Finally, what would the gurus say - does fragmentation pose a heavy problem on nearly-filled-up pools made of spinning HDDs (I believe so, at least judging from those performance degradation problems writing to 80+%-filled pools), and can fragmentation be effectively combatted on ZFS at all (with or without BP rewrite)?
There are different types of fragmentation. The fragmentation which causes a slowdown when writing to an almost full pool is fragmentation of the free-list/area (causing zfs to take longer to find free space to write to) as opposed to fragmentation of the files themselves. The files themselves will still not be fragmented any more severely than the zfs blocksize. However, there are seeks and there are *seeks* and some seeks take longer than others so some forms of fragmentation are worse than others. When the free space is fragmented into smaller blocks, there is necessarily more file fragmentation then the file is written.
Bob -- Bob Friesenhahn bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
