Matthew Wakeling wrote:
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.

This is not a good idea.  The 5% is NOT reserved for root's use, but rather is 
to prevent severe file fragmentation.  As the disk gets full, the remaining 
empty spaces tend to be small spaces scattered all over the disk, meaning that 
even for modest-sized files, the kernel can't allocate contiguous disk blocks.  
If you reduce this restriction to 0%, you are virtually guaranteed poor 
performance when you fill up your disk, since those files that are allocated 
last will be massively fragmented.

Worse, the fragmented files that you create remain fragmented even if you clean 
up to get back below the 95% mark.  If Postgres happened to insert a lot of 
data on a 99% full file system, those blocks could be spread all over the 
place, and they'd stay that way forever, even after you cleared some space.

Craig

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