Is there a way to tell ext2 to use a larger block size than 4KB
without major overhauls to the source code? I would like to at least
be able to use an 8KB block size to match the size of the pages on the
Alpha. I was hoping to match the stripe size of my RAID 5 system to
avoid any read-modify-write situations when writing to the RAID
device. The smallest stripe size I can make is 8KB, which may give me
a decent performance if I have an 8KB block size.
Also, I saw (and used) the "-R stride=" option to align the stride *
block-size with my RAID stripe. What exactly does this option buy me?
Will the file system layer wait to write the blocks until it has gotten
the whole of stride * block-size in in-memory data? The only way to
get the maximum write performance out of a RAID 5 setup is to make
sure you are not getting into a read-modify-write situation. Latency
isn't necessarily an issue for me, just raw write performance.
BAPper
