[ILUG] Reiserfs storage efficiency

[Niall O Broin]

It was my understanding that one of the advantages of Reiserfs was its
storage efficiency, although that wasn't the primary reason I switched to
it. However, I was about to remove an unused 1GB SCSI disk from a box which
had some data I wanted. I copied it (using find|cpio) to a reiser filesystem
and to my astonishment, du -s on the directory I copied it to showed 1.3GB
used. Output from du -s * is below

dir	ext2	reiser

bin	3571	3702
boot	1907	1920
dev	39	5416
etc	2751	6350
home	73160	78721
lib	12592	13029
opt	368728	717420
root	3539	5613
sbin	2870	3023
tmp	635	629
usr	475915	531540
var	23835	22647
www	8128	9414


It seems that the minimum space used by a file on a reiser fs is much more
than that on an ext2 fs (1k blocks) - opt is particularly bad, because there
I have a local copy of the cddb database, which has > 125000 files, most of
which are small (< 2k).

Any of you other reiser users seen anything like this or have any ideas
about this ?


Regards, 


Niall



P.S. It's 2.2.16 with the reiserfs-3.5.23 patch.