Re: How capacious and well-indexed are ext4, xfs and btrfs directories?

Darrick J. Wong
2021-05-25T22:13:53Z

On Tue, May 25, 2021 at 10:26:17PM +0100, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Tue, May 25, 2021 at 03:13:52PM -0600, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> > Definitely "-o discard" is known to have a measurable performance impact,
> > simply because it ends up sending a lot more requests to the block device,
> > and those requests can be slow/block the queue, depending on underlying
> > storage behavior.
> >
> > There was a patch pushed recently that targets "-o discard" performance:
> > https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/linux-ext4/list/?series=244091
> > that needs a bit more work, but may be worthwhile to test if it improves
> > your workload, and help put some weight behind landing it?
>
> This all seems very complicated. I have chosen with my current laptop
> to "short stroke" the drive. That is, I discarded the entire bdev,
> then partitioned it roughly in half. The second half has never seen
> any writes. This effectively achieves the purpose of TRIM/discard;
> there are a lot of unused LBAs, so the underlying flash translation layer
> always has plenty of spare space when it needs to empty an erase block.
>
> Since the steady state of hard drives is full, I have to type 'make clean'
> in my build trees more often than otherwise and remember to delete iso
> images after i've had them lying around for a year, but I'd rather clean
> up a little more often than get these weird performance glitches.
>
> And if I really do need half a terabyte of space temporarily, I can
> always choose to use the fallow range for a while, then discard it again.

I just let xfs_scrub run FITRIM on Sundays at 4:30am. ;)

--D