[ILUG] Reiserfs storage efficiency

[Wesley Darlington]

Howdy,

On Fri, Dec 29, 2000 at 03:55:52PM +0000, Niall O Broin wrote:
> 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

Why find|cpio? What's wrong with "cp -a"? (I'm just curious here, mind - I'm 
not being antagonistic! ;-)

> 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

Interesting.

> 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).

Ext2 filesystems with 1k blocks are quite rare these days, no?

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

Was the filesystem mounted with the `notails' option when you copied all 
that stuff onto it? If this is all one filesystem, and you have /boot on it,
chances are you will have it mounted `notails'...? (Which would explain
the awful disk usage, as bad as ext2 with 4kB blocks and a 32MB overhead.)

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

I use 3.5.28 these days with 2.2.18. Seems to work fine.

ATB,
Wesley.