Marat Khalili posted on Thu, 13 Apr 2017 14:06:07 +0300 as excerpted: > After reading this maillist for a while I became a bit more cautious > about using various BTRFS features, so decided to ask just in case: is > it safe to use out-of-band deduplication tools > <https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Deduplication>, and which of > them are considered more stable/mainstream? Also, won't running these > tools exacerbate often mentioned stability/performance problems with > too-many-snapshots? Any first-hand experience is very welcome.
Dedupe works by reflinking, which is how snapshots work too, so yes, it'll trigger the same general issues. However, while snapshots will reflink /everything/ in the snapshot, one could hope dedupe won't find /that/ many duplicates and thus won't reflink at the scale that snapshotting does. Tho of course if it doesn't find at least some reasonable number of duplicates, it's hardly worth the trouble to run. So I'd say it may be worth doing, but do be aware of the scale of dedupe reflinking. What I'd do here is consider that and then count it as roughly another snapshot or two, or whatever, depending on how much dedupeing you actually get. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
