Re: [gentoo-user] Freeing up disk space problem!!

[Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>]

Neil Bothwick writes:

> On Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:25:00 +0100, Alex Schuster wrote:
> 
> > > > Don't reduce it to 0, the lower this value is, the more
> > > > fragmentation you will get.  
> > > 
> > > Why is that? I would have expected more usable space to reduce the
> > > need for fragmentation. I routinely use 0 on non-system
> > > filesystems.  
> > 
> > I read this often, and to me it seems to make sense. When a file
> > system is nearly full, writing a last big file will make the file
> > being cluttered along all those tiny places where some free space is
> > still left. And this probably already happens to some extent before
> > the filesystem is completely full. 
> 
> But if you set m > 0, the filesystem will become full sooner, so
> fragmentation will begin sooner (for non-root processes). 

Uh, really? I wouldn't think so. With m > 0, there is much space left, in
large contiguous chunks, even though the user cannot use it all. But there
should be no difference between writing files in terms of fragmentation.
The reserved stuff acts just like a quota, at least that's what I always
thought.

	Wonko