From: Ashish Sangwan Subject: Fwd: What should be the optimum value of G (number-of-groups) when using flex_bg? Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2012 10:06:19 +0530 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Cc: Namjae Jeon , linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org To: "Theodore Ts'o" , adilger@dilger.ca Return-path: Received: from mail-vc0-f174.google.com ([209.85.220.174]:38120 "EHLO mail-vc0-f174.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753297Ab2KFEgU (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Nov 2012 23:36:20 -0500 Received: by mail-vc0-f174.google.com with SMTP id fk26so25846vcb.19 for ; Mon, 05 Nov 2012 20:36:19 -0800 (PST) In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: We have a 2TB HDD which we formated using default options of mkfs.ext4(v1.42.6). I took around ~15 seconds to complete this operation. Than we formatted the same partition with "-G 1024" and there was around 30% performance improvement in the mkfs.ext4 timings. Than, out of curiosity, we increased the G's value to 1048576 and there was a drastic degradation in the performance of mkfs.ext4. It took more than 5 minutes to complete the execution. Is it the expected behavior? AFAIK flex_bg is on by default with G's vaule as 16. Can we consider this the optimum value? Any suggesstions on what we can set the Gs value for a 2TB HDD such that both the FS and the mkfs.ext4 gives optimum performance? It would be really helpful if somebody can shed some light over this feature. Thanks, Ashish