On Fri, Jan 12, 2018 at 11:24 AM, Austin S. Hemmelgarn <ahferro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> To that end, I propose the following text for the FAQ: > > Q: Do I need to run a balance regularly? > > A: While not strictly necessary for normal operations, running a filtered > balance regularly can help prevent your filesystem from ending up with > ENOSPC issues. The following command run daily on each BTRFS volume should > be more than sufficient for most users: > > `btrfs balance start -dusage=25 -dlimit=2..10 -musage=25 -mlimit=2..10` Daily? Seems excessive. I've got multiple Btrfs file systems that I haven't balanced, full or partial, in a year. And I have no problems. One is a laptop which accumulates snapshots until roughly 25% free space remains and then most of the snapshots are deleted, except the most recent few, all at one time. I'm not experiencing any problems so far. The other is a NAS and it's multiple copies, with maybe 100-200 snapshots. One backup volume is 99% full, there's no more unallocated free space, I delete snapshots only to make room for btrfs send receive to keep pushing the most recent snapshot from the main volume to the backup. Again no problems. I really think suggestions this broad are just going to paper over bugs or design flaws, we won't see as many bug reports and then real problems won't get fixed. I also thing the time based method is too subjective. What about the layout means a balance is needed? And if it's really a suggestion, why isn't there a chron or systemd unit that just does this for the user, in btrfs-progs, working and enabled by default? I really do not like all this hand holding of Btrfs, it's not going to make it better. > A full, unfiltered balance (one without any options passed in) is completely > unnecessary for normal usage of a filesystem. That's good advice. -- Chris Murphy -- 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
