ext4: Don't avoid using BLOCK_UNINIT block groups in mballoc
By avoiding the use of not-yet-used block groups (i.e., block groups
with the BLOCK_UNINIT flag), mballoc had a tendency to create large
files with large non-contiguous gaps. In addition avoiding the use of
new block groups had a tendency to push regular file data into the
first block group in a flex_bg group, which slows down the speed of
e2fsck pass 2, since it has a tendency to seek much more. For
example:
This was on a sample 80 gig root filesystem which was approximately
50% full. Note the improved e2fsck pass 2 performance, by over a
factor of 3, due to a decreased number of seeks. (The total amount of
I/O in pass 2 was unchanged; the layout of the directory blocks was
simply much better from e2fsck's's perspective.)
Other changes as a result of this patch on this sample filesystem:
Before Patch After Patch
# of non-contig files 762 779
# of non-contig directories 571 570
# of BLOCK_UNINIT bg's 307 293
# of INODE_UNINIT bg's 503 503
Out of 640 block groups, of which 333 were in use, this patch caused
an extra 14 block groups to be utilized. The number of non-contiguous
files did go up slightly, but when measured against the 99.9% of the
files (603,154) which were contiguously allocated, this is pretty
insignificant.
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu> Signed-off-by: Andreas Dilger <adilger@sun.com>