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Neil Bothwick writes: |
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> On Tue, 28 Feb 2012 14:01:50 +0100, Alex Schuster wrote: |
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> |
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> > If you instantly need more space, reduce the amount of reserved space |
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> > for the superuser, which is 5% as default: |
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> > tune2fs -m 2 /dev/your/partition |
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> > Don't reduce it to 0, the lower this value is, the more fragmentation |
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> > you will get. |
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> |
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> Why is that? I would have expected more usable space to reduce the need |
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> for fragmentation. I routinely use 0 on non-system filesystems. |
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I read this often, and to me it seems to make sense. When a file system |
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is nearly full, writing a last big file will make the file being |
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cluttered along all those tiny places where some free space is still |
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left. And this probably already happens to some extent before the |
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filesystem is completely full. |
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Now, which values for reserved percentage are good, I don't know. |
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This probably depends much on the typical size of files on that partition, |
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and usage patterns. For large movies on your data partition, it probably |
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does not matter, but for my system partitions (/root, /usr, /var, /tmp, |
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portage stuff) I just keep it at 5%. |
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With the benefit that I can instantly free some space in /var when it's |
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just become full, without needing to decide what to delete. Okay, in |
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practice this does not matter much because resizing the LVM and resizing |
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the FS is also a matter of seconds only. |
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Wonko |
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