Am Samstag, 17. Dezember 2011 schrieb Hugo Mills: > > > The metadata trees are automatically balanced, simply by the > > >nature > > > > > > of the B-tree algorithms used. Balance won't, in general, affect > > > them. The only thing that a balance will achieve on a single-disk > > > filesystem is to reclaim unused space from allocated block groups > > > -- so the "total" value in your Data and Metadata entries below > > > will go down. > > > > > > > > But thats only for optical viewing pleasure as far as I understood > > you? > > > > > > > > Only if there would be not enough free space for one tree to extend > > then a balance would make sense? I.e. when I had a lot of metadata > > so that the metadata would need to extend (which seems unlikely > > given below figures). > > From the context, I think you're misusing the term "tree" here to > mean "block group type" (i.e. data or metadata). > > That aside, though, yes, you're right, it's effectively only > cosmetic -- although it can be useful if you have a fully-allocated > filesystem where (for example) data is full and there's lots of > metadata space free, and you want to write more data. In that case, > the FS wants to allocate another Data block group, but can't because > there's no raw storage left to allocate from, despite there being lots > of free space in the allocated Metadata block groups. A balance in > that case would free up some of the metadata block groups and allow > that space to be reallocated as data. (I think it tries to do this > anyway, but I'm not 100% sure about that). Okay, thats the more likely case then ;). Thanks for clearing that up, -- Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
