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Date:      Tue, 7 Jan 2003 15:40:43 -0800
From:      David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU>
To:        phk@FreeBSD.ORG
Cc:        Willem Jan Withagen <wjw@withagen.nl>, current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: panic with panic: kmem_malloc(4096): kmem_map too small...
Message-ID:  <20030107234043.GA574@HAL9000.homeunix.com>
In-Reply-To: <31595.1041930665@critter.freebsd.dk>
References:  <01e701c2b62b$db07ddd0$471b3dd4@dual> <31595.1041930665@critter.freebsd.dk>

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Thus spake phk@FreeBSD.ORG <phk@FreeBSD.ORG>:
> >And to that fact I have a question:
> >    At the moment 8% of the disk is reserved. 
> >    It being a 170Gb raid, that wastes a good 13,6Gb, which I find at lot.
> >    tunefs lets me bring that down to 5% = 8,5Gb without speed penalty.
> >    But is for this size of spare space such a large threshold really required??
> >    And IF i would like to experiment, where do I look for the knop to turn??
> 
> Basically you don't need to reserve anything, but as you get closer to
> filling the disk the time to find a free space increases rapidly and
> your files get very fragmented.  Trouble is: they never get defragmented
> unless you copy them (or do a full dump/restore).
> 
> I'm not sure how to nail the "right" number of % down, and I'm sure
> that both Kirk and I would like to hear your numbers :-)

If someone is interested in investigating this in detail, Margo
Setzer et alii did a study a few years ago on aging filesystems in
order to measure fragmentation.  Their intent was not to measure
the effect of free space on fragmentation, but their methodology
could be applied for that purpose.  They happen to have a graph
that suggests that large file throughput drops about 20% for a
filesystem that is 75% full versus a nearly empty filesystem.

	http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~vino/fs-perf/papers/sigmetrics.ps.gz

I don't think you'll find that it's a good idea to have a
filesystem more than 90% full.  At that load factor, even a
uniform hash will take on average 2.5 probes to locate free
space, and performance can only exponentially decrease from
there.  No filesystem can avoid fragmentation and perform well
without a bit of breathing room.

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