Theodore Y. Ts'o writes:
> It depends on what how big the files you are writing. It's not
> necessary for the free space to be contiguous; just large enough so that
> files written to the disk can still be contiguous. For example, for an
> 5% of 8 gig is 40 megs. If most of the files you write are smaller than
> 1 meg, it's likely that the files can be stored contiguously, even if
> the filesystem only has 5-10% free space on it.
5% of 8 gig is 400 megs, not 40 megs. Was 40 a typo or is your
argument meant to imply that 0.5% free space is enough?
That was a typo on my part....
Note on BSD systems, the standard reserved percentage is 10%. We moved
it down to 5% because the anti-defragmentation performance still seems
to work well at that level. (Although of course with nasty usage
patterns and very large files you can probably screw over even a 10%
reserve.)
Folks who are really desparate for space can try tuning the percentage
and seeing what works well. On the other hand, disk is getting cheaper
and cheaper, and someone's time to actually do the test may not be worth
it; it's probably much more cost effective to just spend a hundred bucks
and get another 2-3 gigabytes of space. :-)
- Ted
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