UFS2 tuning for heterogeneous 4TB file system

Maxim Khitrov mkhitrov at gmail.com
Sun Jul 26 02:34:02 UTC 2009


Hi all,

I've spent a few hours now reading on how to set newfs parameters for
various environments (many small files, many large files, etc.). I
must say that I still don't have a clear picture of the relationships
between cylinders, blocks, fragments, and inodes. That's making things
difficult for me in figuring out what to use in my situation.

The file system in question will not have a common file size (which is
what, as I understand, bytes per inode should be tuned for). There
will be many small files (< 10 KB) and many large ones (> 500 MB). A
similar, in terms of content, 2TB ntfs file system on another server
has an average file size of about 26 MB with 59,246 files.

Ideally, I would prefer that small files do not waste more than 4 KB
of space, which is what you have with ntfs. At the same time, having
fsck running for days after an unclean shutdown is also not a good
option (I always disable background checking). From what I've gathered
so far, the two requirements are at the opposite ends in terms of file
system optimization.

So the question is what would be the optimal newfs parameters in my
situation? Please don't suggest using zfs. Right now I'm in the
testing phase and need to get the best configuration for usf2. After
that I will give zfs a try. OS is FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE-p2 amd64.

Thanks for your help,
Max


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