Very Computer

Does anyone have any opinions on the suggestion that it is safe to
reduce minfree to 5% on large (>1Gb) filesystems without any
performance degradation. This is based on the supposition that the
original BSD filesystem design was based on large filesystems of about
400-500Mb & that with modern disks of >1Gb maintaining the 10% free is
overcautious.

Barrie
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Barrie Spence                   Sanity Clause? There is no Sanity Clause

   Does anyone have any opinions on the suggestion that it is safe to
   reduce minfree to 5% on large (>1Gb) filesystems without any
   performance degradation. This is based on the supposition that the
   original BSD filesystem design was based on large filesystems of about
   400-500Mb & that with modern disks of >1Gb maintaining the 10% free is
   overcautious.

I reduce large filesystems to 5% by habit.  I've never had a problem or any
noticable degradation.  The original filesystems were alot smaller that
400-500Mb.

-spp
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Stephen P Potter        Pencom Systems Administration         AMP Incorporated

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                Systems Administation: It's a Kind of Magic

  On our disks with >3Gb paritions I normally reduce this futher to 3%..
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 Name:Trevor Paquette      |Alberta Energy Company Ltd |Work:(403) 266-8400

        It is my understanding that the freespace reserved for
filesystem overhead is using during file creation/deletion
activity, as well as file extension.  We have several filesystems
with no creation/deletion/extension of files ... just a few large
files of fixed length.  After discussing my idea with technical
support of the hardware vendor, I set the minfree to 0% on those
filesystems.  Haven't noticed any degradation of throughput.  I
would suspect that the value of minfree is more dependent on the
activity on the disk than the size of the disk.  Which means 10%
(the default) may be too much or not enough.  Caveat: your
mileage may vary.