ext3 tuning for big files
 

Hi,
Can anyone help me in this?
I have got several 250GB partitions , where i need to create ext3 filesystem.
The files that would be written in these partitions are very large files each of 16GB.
How can I fine tune this? If I take all the default values of mke2fs , it takes long to create the filesystem and to store the large files also(actually these large files are database files.)
For doing this I have put some parameters.

mke2fs -j -T largefile4 -m 2 -L /label_name /device_name
Is it ok?
Also after doing some googling I reduced the space reserved for super user to 2%. What does this space reserved for super user meant for?
Can I do some more performance tuning?

Thanks in Advance,
Amitabh.

As for the tuning, that looks good (-T largefile4 should automatically do tunings such as large block sizes, inode counts, etc.).
It means that when the disk is full for normal users, the superuser may write to some reserved space. This is good for instances where you have a single root filesystem, which has run out of space because of user X’s actions. But you don’t want user X’s actions to stop the daemons (e.g., syslogd and friends) from doing their jobs. This is a very old solution to the problem. More modern-day solutions include separate home partitions and user quotas.

Thanks for your help osor.

Why don't you use xfs instead? It's vastly superior precisely when dealing with huge files.

However, based on what I've seen heard, XFS is also a lot more prone to become corrupted in the event of an unclean shutdown. If your power is good and/or you're on a decent UPS that's no problem (and any filesystem has some risk of corruption in an unclean shutdown) but you may want to be aware of that.

I've found that even on large (4+ TB) RAID volumes ext3 with nothing more than the SPARSE_SUPER and LARGE_FILE options enabled at mkfs time gives acceptable file serving performance. I've tinkered with other file systems and not found a huge difference although Reiser is known to perform better in cases where you have lots of small files.