*BSD News Article 25884


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From: nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu (Nate Williams)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: [FreeBSD] free diskspace?
Date: 12 Jan 1994 00:53:49 GMT
Organization: Montana State University - Bozeman MT
Lines: 41
Message-ID: <2gvhmt$bv5@pdq.coe.montana.edu>
References: <gate.8oaTFc1w165w@subway.hacktic.nl> <2gmsqn$qo9@pdq.coe.montana.edu> <CJF8H5.E8p@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: bsd.coe.montana.edu

In article <CJF8H5.E8p@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>,
Richard Tobin <richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>In article <2gmsqn$qo9@pdq.coe.montana.edu> nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu (Nate Williams) writes:
>>Basically, to get a big improvement in I/O speed, you must
>>leavre 10% free on your disk to keep the filesystem from becoming too
>>fragmented.
>
>A fairly recent net discussion - in which someone actually (gasp!)
>posted some figures - suggested that you can cut it down to 5% without
>any problem.  At around 2% the performance started to become seriously
>worse.

I take the above (gasp!) as sarcasm.

I believe the poster was Chris Torek, and although changing it from 10% to
5% might be a good idea, I've no idea on where the changes need to go in
the FS code to make 5% the default.

There are other more pressing issues on my time than to squeeze another
5% of the disk space out, and anyone who is that close to the wall on
disk space needs to start looking at anothe disk.  This isn't saying
that this isn't important, but it's not that important to me, and
I'm the guy doing the work. :-)

>Things have changed quite a bit since the 10% figure was originally
>given - in particular the trade-off between disk i/o and cpu time has
>changed substantially.

Agreed.  If you can send me the changes required to make 5% the default
size I'll make sure it gets brought up with the FreeBSD developers.



Nate


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