Re: Bumping block size to 16K on FreeBSD...

On Thu, Aug 28, 2003, scott.marlowe wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Aug 2003, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> > On Thu, 28 Aug 2003, Thomas Swan wrote:
> > 
> > > Has anyone looked at changing the default block size across the board
> > > and what the performance improvements/penalties might be?  Hardware has
> > > changed quite a bit over the years.
> > 
> > I *think* that the reason for the performance improvement on FreeBSD is
> > that our FS block size is 16k, instead of 8k ... are there any other
> > OSs that have increased theirs?
> 
> Linux, is still, as far as I know, limited to the max page size of the CPU 
> it's on, which for most x86 is 4k.

I don't know about the page size issue, but Linux has the
additional problem that ext2/ext3 do not support fragments or
variable block sizes within the same filesystem.  Therefore, Linux
wastes an excessive amount of space for larger block sizes.