Hi, This might be a silly question: which would be the best inode ratio for a 5 Tb filesystem dedicated to Maildir++ storage? I use ubuntu server, which has a preconfigured setting for mkfs.ext4 called "news" with inode_ratio = 4096, and after formating the fs with that setting and then with the defautl setting I see this difference of space (wasted space, but more inodes): 4328633696 free 1K-blocks with mkfs's "-T news" switch = 1219493877 free inodes 4557288800 free 1K-blocks with default mkfs settings = 304873461 free inodes I'll be storing e-mail messages for around 20,000 accounts on that partition (average 512 Mb per account). Would you consider worth the waste of about 200 Gb of the filesystem space in exchange of more inodes? Thanks. Rodolfo.
Rodolfo Gonzalez put forth on 2/19/2010 5:18 PM:> Hi, > > This might be a silly question: which would be > the best inode ratio for a 5 Tb filesystem dedicated to Maildir++ > storage? I use ubuntu server, which has a preconfigured setting for > mkfs.ext4 called "news" with inode_ratio = 4096, and after formating the > fs with that setting and then with the defautl setting I see this > difference of space (wasted space, but more inodes): > > 4328633696 free 1K-blocks with mkfs's "-T news" switch = 1219493877 free > inodes > 4557288800 free 1K-blocks with default mkfs settings = 304873461 free > inodes > > I'll be storing e-mail messages for around 20,000 accounts on that > partition (average 512 Mb per account). Would you consider worth the > waste of about 200 Gb of the filesystem space in exchange of more inodes?If your version of Ubuntu server has XFS support built in, forget ext4 and go XFS. It's more reliable, faster in every single benchmark I've seen especially for large numbers of files, both large and small, has a ton of management tools and instrumentation interfaces, and has a proven enterprise track record. -- Stan
Hi! On Fre, 2010-02-19 at 17:18 -0600, Rodolfo Gonzalez wrote: [...]> This might be a silly question: which would beNot at all IMHO.> the best inode ratio for a 5 Tb filesystem dedicated to Maildir++ > storage? I use ubuntu server, which has a preconfigured setting for > mkfs.ext4 called "news" with inode_ratio = 4096, and after formating the > fs with that setting and then with the defautl setting I see this > difference of space (wasted space, but more inodes): > > 4328633696 free 1K-blocks with mkfs's "-T news" switch = 1219493877 free > inodes > 4557288800 free 1K-blocks with default mkfs settings = 304873461 free inodes > > I'll be storing e-mail messages for around 20,000 accounts on that > partition (average 512 Mb per account). Would you consider worth the > waste of about 200 Gb of the filesystem space in exchange of more inodes?That depends entirely if 512MB mail per account a few large ones or a lot of small ones (assuming that the future behaviour is similar to the past). So perhaps it helps to count the files (and directories) on that file system as each of them actually uses an i-node. BTW you can set other values than "default" and "news", namely the number directly. Bernd -- Bernd Petrovitsch Email : bernd at petrovitsch.priv.at LUGA : http://www.luga.at