On Thu, 15 May 2008, Philippe Amelant wrote:
using mkfs.ext3 I can use "-T" to tune the filesytem

mkfs.ext3 -T fs_type ...

fs_type are in /etc/mke2fs.conf (on debian)

If you look at that file, you'd see that tuning really doesn't change that much. In fact, the only thing it does change (if you avoid "small" and "floppy") is the number of inodes available in the filesystem. Since Postgres tends to produce few large files, you don't need that many inodes, so the "largefile" option may be best. However, note that the number of inodes is a hard limit of the filesystem - if you try to create more files on the filesystem than there are available inodes, then you will get an out of space error even if the filesystem has space left. The only real benefit of having not many inodes is that you waste a little less space, so many admins are pretty generous with this setting.

Probably of more use are some of the other settings:

 -m reserved-blocks-percentage - this reserves a portion of the filesystem
    that only root can write to. If root has no need for it, you can kill
    this by setting it to zero. The default is for 5% of the disc to be
    wasted.
 -j turns the filesystem into ext3 instead of ext2 - many people say that
    for Postgres you shouldn't do this, as ext2 is faster.

Matthew

--
The surest protection against temptation is cowardice.
                                             -- Mark Twain

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