So I noticed the fairly recent addition of the FRAG column in pool output.

[root@anto ~]# zpool list
NAME    SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
data   16.3T  4.67T  11.6T         -     0%    28%  1.00x  ONLINE  -
zones  1.06T   245G   843G         -    34%    22%  1.00x  ONLINE  -

This ought to be a measure of pool fragmentation. 0% on the "data"
pool makes sense; the data here is essentially static, write-once
read-many data. The "zones" pool is seeing slowly increasing
fragmentation. I'm guessing this will reach a steady state at some
level, based on for example the writeup of fragmentation in
http://blog.delphix.com/uday/2013/02/19/78/. So the things I wonder
are:

What does the percentage mean exactly (number of what per what?) and
where might I expect it to stabilize for a 22% full pool?

The Delphix blog post shows a fairly drastic decrease in write
performance with increased fragmentation. This sounds bad, and I guess
it's this effect that motivates showing the percentage in the first
place. But I don't really get why that is, while the pool is still
fairly empty? The number of free blocks is the same, they just aren't
contiguous. Is the issue with large sequential writes that then cannot
be sequential? In that case it would be mostly a nonissue for the
"zones" pool that usually sees small, random, sync writes (KVM etc)?

//jb


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