Re: Filesystem fragmentation (Re: Fragmentation of WAL files)

* Bill Moran:

> To clarify my viewpoint:
> To my knowledge, there is no Unix filesystem that _suffers_ from
> fragmentation.  Specifically, all filessytems have some degree of
> fragmentation that occurs, but every Unix filesystem that I am aware of
> has built-in mechanisms to mitigate this and prevent it from becoming
> a performance issue.

One database engine tends to create a huge number of fragments because
the files are written with holes in them.  There is a significant
impact on sequential reads, but that doesn't matter much because the
engine doesn't implement fast, out-of-order B-tree scans anyway. 8-/

I still think that preallocating in reasonably sized chunks is
beneficial.

-- 
Florian Weimer                
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