From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed May 26 21: 6:58 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from caffeine.internal.enteract.com (caffeine.internal.enteract.com [207.229.129.24]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id E09F61507B for ; Wed, 26 May 1999 21:06:49 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dscheidt@enteract.com) Received: (qmail 4864 invoked from network); 27 May 1999 04:06:49 -0000 Received: from shell-2.enteract.com (dscheidt@207.229.143.41) by caffeine.internal.enteract.com with SMTP; 27 May 1999 04:06:49 -0000 Received: from localhost (dscheidt@localhost) by shell-2.enteract.com (8.9.3/8.9.2) with SMTP id XAA15670; Wed, 26 May 1999 23:06:47 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from dscheidt@enteract.com) X-Authentication-Warning: shell-2.enteract.com: dscheidt owned process doing -bs Date: Wed, 26 May 1999 23:06:46 -0500 (CDT) From: David Scheidt To: Graeme Tait Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, info@boatbooks.com Subject: Re: File system gets too fragmented ??? In-Reply-To: <374CA707.6FB5@echidna.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wed, 26 May 1999, Graeme Tait wrote: > It contains about 900,000 files, most of which are small, occupying > around 2-5 fragments. The small files are updated monthly from a tar > > However, I don't understand how the FFS works, so I'm just probing and > guessing as to what's going on here. > > Could someone please shed a little light on this? Is FreeBSD not able to > self-manage a filesystem operated in this way? Is there some way of > preventing the problem, or of periodically cleaning things up (rebuilding > the whole filesystem from backup means being down for over an hour on a > 24x7 server)? The problem you have is that a file on FFS file system can have at most one fragmented block. With the number of small files that you have, it isn't terribly suprising that you are running out of full blocks when there is still space free on the disk. I don't think there is a whole lot you can do about the problem. A 1024B frag size might mask the problem of having space free, but with no aligned blocks, not allocatable. You should also think hard about why you need a million 1536 byte files on the same filesystem. I don't know what you are doing, but you might consider a real database. David Scheidt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message