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From: Atila Romero <atila.alr@dpf.gov.br>
To: linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Compression of large files
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 11:10:09 -0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <4A1D49C1.8070903@dpf.gov.br> (raw)

During a file write, if the compression doesn't proves to be economical
to a portion of the file, the whole file is marked as nocompress, and
subsequent writes don't use compression at all. This can be seen as a 
feature, as it saves CPU in files like videos. But if the file is a dd
image of a disk, or other types of large files, this behavior is
undesirable, since different portions of the file will have different
compression ratios.
I only became aware of this after searching the source code, after
spending some hours trying to find out why the compression wasn't
working. This can be a really unexpected behavior for a end user who is
looking for compression.
The specific part of the code is at inode.c:
477 <#l477>
                /* flag the file so we don't compress in the future */
478 <#l478>                 btrfs_set_flag(inode, NOCOMPRESS);

How about commenting line 478?

Atila


             reply	other threads:[~2009-05-27 14:10 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 2+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2009-05-27 14:10 Atila Romero [this message]
2009-05-27 14:41 ` Compression of large files Chris Mason

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