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25 Sep
2006
25 Sep
'06
19:09
When formatting a partition there are tradeoffs to be made in selecting the block sizes. If you know you'll need lots of small files, select a small bytes/inode ratio (e.g., 1k-4k/inode). OTOH, if you know you're only going to store lots of large files, selecting a large ratio, e.g. 32k/inode, can be more performant. However, on such a system you would use 32k of space even for files which are 1 byte in size. On today's drives, this normally poses little problem, though.
Reiserfs makes the impression it would be inodeless (as in counting), by showing 0 on `df -i`, and the 'tail packing' thing just emphasizes that. Jan Engelhardt --