By avoiding the use of not-yet-used block groups (i.e., block groups
with the BLOCK_UNINIT flag), mballoc had a tendency to create large
files with large non-contiguous gaps. In addition avoiding the use of
new block groups had a tendency to push regular file data into the
first block group in a flex_bg group, which slows down the speed of
e2fsck pass 2, since it has a tendency to seek much more. For
example:
Before Patch After Patch
Time in seconds Time in seconds
Real / User/ Sys MB/s Real / User/ Sys MB/s
Pass 1 8.52 / 2.21 / 0.46 20.43 8.84 / 4.97 / 1.11 19.68
Pass 2 21.16 / 1.02 / 1.86 11.30 6.54 / 1.77 / 1.78 36.39
Pass 3 0.01 / 0.00 / 0.00 139.00 0.01 / 0.01 / 0.00 128.90
Pass 4 0.16 / 0.15 / 0.00 0.00 0.17 / 0.17 / 0.00 0.00
Pass 5 2.52 / 1.99 / 0.09 0.79 2.31 / 1.78 / 0.06 0.86
Total 32.40 / 5.11 / 2.49 12.81 17.99 / 8.75 / 2.98 23.01
This was on a sample 80 gig root filesystem which was approximately
50% full. Note the improved e2fsck pass 2 performance, by over a
factor of 3, due to a decreased number of seeks. (The total amount of
I/O in pass 2 was unchanged; the layout of the directory blocks was
simply much better from e2fsck's's perspective.)
Other changes as a result of this patch on this sample filesystem:
Before Patch After Patch
# of non-contig files 762 779
# of non-contig directories 571 570
# of BLOCK_UNINIT bg's 307 293
# of INODE_UNINIT bg's 503 503
Out of 640 block groups, of which 333 were in use, this patch caused
an extra 14 block groups to be utilized. The number of non-contiguous
files did go up slightly, but when measured against the 99.9% of the
files (603,154) which were contiguously allocated, this is pretty
insignificant.
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Signed-off-by: Andreas Dilger <adilger@sun.com>
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