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Date:      Fri, 03 Aug 2007 12:33:16 -0400
From:      Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com>
To:        Wojciech Puchar <wojtek@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: UFS and spreading data
Message-ID:  <46B358CC.8010804@mac.com>
In-Reply-To: <20070803145528.B16127@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl>
References:  <20070803145528.B16127@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl>

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Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> AFAIK UFS try to spread data quite evenly on disk to different cylinder 
> group - for large files, so small files can get it's space near inodes 
> etc..

Yes, UFS leaves some free space in each cylinder group if it can so that it 
can grow (especially small) files locally; big files will get spread across 
cylinder groups as a result.

> but i would like to clear things up:
> 
> i will set up say 3 disks with gconcat and make one partition for all 
> data on it. then i will populate it with all things and use it.
> 
> will the data be quite spread on disks, so accesses to different things 
> could be done in parallel to 3 disks, or will it rather use space on one 
> disk first, then on second then on third.
> 
> i'm asking about it as i prefer gconcat over gstripe as i can add more 
> disks to gconcat and do growfs then making system EASILY expandable.

Using a stripe is going to give reliably-balanced I/O load to the underlying 
physical disks.  If the concat is mostly empty, then no, I/O won't be evenly 
balanced.  If you mostly fill it up and are doing multithreaded I/O to lots of 
files scattered all around, than concat should be OK.

-- 
-Chuck



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