Improper shutdown of system / Fragmentation Problems / Boot

[Stijn Hoop]

On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 02:21:40PM -0500, Scott wrote:
> As a newbie to FreeBSD, I may be way off base, but it seems 
> very logical to me that the size of your drive or partition 
> would make a difference on at what percentage full one would 
> start to notice problems.
> 
> In terms of megs/gigs 80% of 120 gigs still has a lot of 
> work space left. 80% of 4 gigs is not much. I would think 
> with a larger drive/partition, one could run at a higher 
> percentage before trouble started.
> 
> It makes sense to me anyway :)

That's what one would like, but UFS doesn't work that way.  It's allocation
algorithm assumes 10% of the disk is free -- regardless of actual size. Or so
I've been told (multiple times).

IMHO this is a bit ridiculous -- I mean, given 1 TB of space (nearly feasible
for a home server right now), why would an FS allocator need 10% of that if
the files on the volume are averaging 10 MB?

But then again, and this is worth noting -- I'm certainly nowhere near as
clueful as others on how to design a stable & fast file system.  Seeing as
UFS1 is still in use, and has been for the last 20 years (think about it!), I
think maybe the tradeoff might make sense to an expert...

BTW, note that you really need to consider the perfomance drop for yourself
-- like others said, if the files on the volume change infrequently,
performance matters little, and space more so.

--Stijn

-- 
This sentence contradicts itself -- no actually it doesn't.
		-- Hofstadter
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