Should We Worry About Virtual Disk Fragmentation?
Mar 1,
2016
Recently, I explained about qcow2 or QEMU Copy-On-Write v2 and some performance trade-offs for virtual disks. One thing that might alarm you is the appearance of a high percentage reported fragmentation on compressed qcow2 disks. Don’t worry, this isn’t what you probably think! That’s all you really need to know, keep reading if you want […]
Avoid Fragmentation: Newer is Better
Nov 25,
2015
File system fragmentation sounds like a dreary topic, but nothing is as tedious as waiting for a sluggish system. Because the disks are the slowest components in the system by a large margin, careful attention to file system layout and fragmentation reduction can yield large gains. “Newer is Better” in several ways, let’s look at […]
Linux File Systems: Heading Toward Btrfs
Jun 25,
2015
I’ve recently told you about the Ext–Ext2–Ext3–Ext4 series of Linux file systems, and the XFS file system originally invented by Silicon Graphics and now the default file system in many Linux distributions. Where are things going? Enterprise-Class File Systems Linux came from humble beginnings, just consider Linus Torvalds’ original announcement. Meanwhile the engineers at Sun […]
Linux File Systems Part Two: The XFS File System
Jun 17,
2015
I was flipping through the TV channels one recent evening when I came across dinosaurs chasing Sam Neill through a jungle. Jurassic Park, I haven’t seen that in ages! But after a while I wondered, where are Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum? And these other people, they weren’t in that movie, were they? During the […]
The Smorgasbord of Linux File Systems, Part One: The Extended Family
Jun 12,
2015
“Linux has a wealth of filesystems to choose from, but we are facing a number of challenges with scaling to the large storage subsystems that are becoming common in today’s data centers. Filesystems need to scale in their ability to address and manage large storage, and also in their ability to detect, repair and correct […]