Hi managers,
I had hoped that upgrading to 5.1A (from 4.0F) would solve issues that we 
had with AdvFS handling lots of small files, however it would appear that 
there are still issues, despite what I'm reading in the man pages...
I have a single volume domain, consisting of (currently) 9 file sets. The 
volume is 180GB, RAID-5, provided by a HSG80 Fibre channel controller.
Each file set, contains a months worth of data, with the data for each 
day being held in a separate directory, and then each day being split up 
again into 100 directories, to prevent there being too many files in a 
single directory.
So for example, for February i've got:
/images/2002/02/ {01-28} / {00-99}
/images/2002/02 is the mount point for the file set image_r1#2002-02.
Each directory at the bottom of the tree contains approximately 1200 
files, with file sizes ranging from 1KB to 10KB.
To populate the data, I'm currently copying the files over from our live 
system. As the number of files in the domain increased, performance 
dropped off considerably, until the stage, where one of the copy 
processes was taking up 98-99% of CPU, making the machine essentially 
unusable.
Having had similar issues under 4.0F, which were worked around by 
specifying the -x and -p options to mkfdmn, I've had a quick look at the 
special files in the .tags directories of each fileset. (output at end) 
The large number of extents being shown in M-10 is presumably what is 
causing the issue, but how to fix / prevent it ?
Having got the luxury of a second identical 180GB volume to play with, I 
tried creating the filesets with the nofrag option set. This appears to 
prevent the large number of extents, and I don't get the performance 
hits. However for the same number of files I'm using nearly double the 
amount of disk space with each file taking up a minimum of 8KB, so this 
isn't a long term option.
Could someone give me some hints as to how best to configure things.
Regards,
Rob Leadbeater
# showfile -x M-6
         Id  Vol  PgSz  Pages  XtntType  Segs  SegSz  I/O   Perf  File
fffffffa.0000    1    16     74    simple    **     **  ftx     7%  M-6
    extentMap: 1
        pageOff    pageCnt     vol    volBlock    blockCnt
              0          1       1          32          16
              1          1       1   154427264          16
              2          1       1   167214720          16
              3          1       1   337188336          16
              4          1       1   192687696          16
              5          1       1   227443408          16
              6          1       1   331138000          16
<snip>
            70          1       1   313102272          16
             71          1       1   320029040          16
             72          1       1   327788656          16
             73          1       1   334896688          16
        extentCnt: 74
# showfile -x M-10 | pg
         Id  Vol  PgSz  Pages  XtntType  Segs  SegSz  I/O   Perf  File
fffffff6.0000    1    16 568747    simple    **     **  ftx    81%  M-10
    extentMap: 1
        pageOff    pageCnt     vol    volBlock    blockCnt
              0          1       1          48          16
              1          1       1   142199920          16
              2     463744       1   142208128     7419904
         463746         47       1   283798720         752
         463793         81       1   149628032        1296
         463874         27       1   198649200         432
         463901         27       1   209264512         432
         463928         27       1   236569312         432
         463955         27       1   301503296         432
<snip>
         568719          6       1   342612384          96
         568725          2       1   342612496          32
         568727          2       1   342612544          32
         568729          4       1   342612592          64
         568733          4       1   342612704          64
         568737         10       1   342402816         160
        extentCnt: 14525
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Received on Mon Mar 18 2002 - 16:16:49 NZST