Return to BSD News archive
Xref: sserve comp.unix.admin:14343 comp.unix.bsd:12776 comp.unix.internals:6358 comp.unix.wizards:31274 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!overload.lbl.gov!dog.ee.lbl.gov!horse.ee.lbl.gov!torek From: torek@horse.ee.lbl.gov (Chris Torek) Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,comp.unix.bsd,comp.unix.internals,comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: why is altering MINFREE discouraged ? Date: 20 Oct 1993 15:20:36 GMT Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley CA Lines: 27 Message-ID: <34862@dog.ee.lbl.gov> References: <CF5DG9.6F@festival.ed.ac.uk> <PCG.93Oct19194620@decb.aber.ac.uk> <1993Oct20.143941.7910@cs.cornell.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: 128.3.112.15 In article <1993Oct20.143941.7910@cs.cornell.edu> chrisb@cs.cornell.edu (Chris Buckley) writes: >As always, I suspect it's very application dependent. ... previous times >that this subject has come up nobody has reported problems using 3-5% on >modern disks. Indeed. The 4.4BSD newfs now defaults to 5% as well. Gordon Irlam's posting also reminds us that much space is wasted as excess inodes, on most file systems. Two `rules of thumb' I used, back when I made file systems for users :-) , were: -i 4096 for FSes with lots of small files (netnews? I forget what I used for news file systems) -i 6144 for `average' FSes -i 8192 for FSes with lots of large files Rebuilding a file system---this is easiest when moving it from one disk to another, or restoring one after a disk failure---with well- tuned parameters (5% minfree, -i 6144) can give you tens of MB back, or even hundreds on really big (> 2GB) partitions. (10% of 2GB is 200 MB, so 5% is 100 MB right there.) -- In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Lawrence Berkeley Lab CSE/EE (+1 510 486 5427) Berkeley, CA Domain: torek@ee.lbl.gov