Re: tuning XFS for tiny files

Nathan Scott
2007-07-19T23:05:18Z

On Wed, 2007-07-18 at 15:52 -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote:
>
> > Hi. Is there a way to tune XFS filesystem parameters to better
> address
> > the usage pattern of 10000s of tiny files in directories such as:
> > maildir directory
> > mh mail directory
> > ccache directory
> >
> > My understanding is that XFS will always be much slower than
> reiserfs
> > with respect to deleting 10000s files; but that XFS might be
> possible to
> > tune toward more rapid read access of 10000s of tiny files.
> >
> > Regards,
> > -timotheus
>
> Do you have a way to benchmark your load?
>
> logv2 at mkfs time, and throwing in larger logbufs & logbsize as mount
> options might help.

For these kinds of workloads, you may have some joy using a mkfs run
with smaller blocksize (down to 512 bytes) and also larger directory
blocksize (up to 64k). (e.g. mkfs.xfs -bsize=512 -nsize=16k ...)

cheers.

--
Nathan