any large inode size benefits? (ext4)

Question

From some foggy memories I thought I would "improve" the default settings when creating a Linux partition and increased the inode size to 1024, and also turned on -O bigalloc ("This ext4 feature enables clustered block allocation").

Now, though, I can't find any concrete benefits to these settings cited on the net, and I see that with 20% disk usage I'm already using 15% of the inodes.

So should I simply reformat the partition, or is there a positive to look on (or to use as justification)? E.g. for directories with lots of files?

Answer 1

Larger inodes are useful if you have many files with a large amount of metadata. The smallest inode size has room for classical metadata: permissions, timestamps, etc., as well as the address of a few blocks for regular files, or the target of short symbolic links. Larger inodes can store extended attributes such as access control lists and SELinux contexts. If there is not enough room for the extended attributes in the inode, they have to be stored in a separate block, which makes opening the file or reading its metadata slower.

Hence you should use a larger inode size if you're planning on having large amounts of extended attributes such as complex ACLs, or if you're using SELinux. SELinux is the primary motivation for larger inodes.

Answer 2

Larger inode size can help performance for very large files/dirs at the expense of disk usage (and possibly performance for small files).

The bytes-per-inode ratio is what you want to take a closer look at if you feel your inode usage is too high. Many related Q&As on several StackExchange sites.

Answer 3

20% disk usage vs. 15% inode usage is not too bad. 20% disk usage vs. 100% inode usage would be a problem. The question is, will you reach 100% inode usage before 100% disk usage. That's when you need more inodes.

It very much depends on the way you use your filesystem. For example if it's a partition that only holds photos or videos or similar files of consistent size, you probably don't have anything to worry about.

If your usage is random and you're likely to extract a few kernel source tarballs in the future, your current ratio might not hold...

Performance wise you probably won't notice a difference under normal circumstances, as long as you don't have an application that pushes limits, like a database that's hot 24/7 where even minor optimizations pay off.

Answer 4

Each file is guaranteed to consume at least 1 inode, and more if the files get sufficiently large. In theory, if your partition is going to be made up of lots of large files, you need fewer inodes. Fewer inodes means more disk space for data. Particular applications are partitions for databases in which the database holds most of the data in several large files (ie, Oracle, MySQL with innodb). When you say "bigalloc" I suppose you mean one of the presets in /etc/mke2fs.conf, such as "big" which in CentOS7 sets the inode_ratio to 32768? I'm not sure but I think that essentially is the parameter to mke2fs's -i "bytes-per-inode" parameter. If these are assumptions are correct, yes reformat-copy will be required:

The larger the bytes-per-inode ratio, the fewer inodes will be created. This value generally shouldn't be smaller than the blocksize of the filesystem, since in that case more inodes would be made than can ever be used. Be warned that it is not possible to change this ratio on a filesystem after it is created, so be careful deciding the correct value for this parameter. Note that resizing a filesystem changes the numer of inodes to maintain this ratio.