Whats a decent amount of free space in regards to this?
80%? 85%? 90%?
Also are we talking about at the volume level, or aggregate level?
Just to clarify :)
Hadrian Baron Network Engineer VEGAS.com
Without testing I don't know what the right answer is and I don't know if there is a point where performance decreases abruptly or if it just tails off gradually. My gut feeling would be to try not to fill an aggregate over 90%.
As for where the free space is located, as I understand it all free blocks in an aggregate are "at large" and could be assigned to any flex volume in the aggregate. The "total size" of a volume simply reserves a certain number of free blocks, but not a specific set of free blocks. (You can over commit an aggregate and have flex volumes whose sizes add up to more than the size of the aggregate. In this case there is no guarantee that a volume can be filled to its total size because the aggregate could fill first. I am assuming that the aggregate is not over committed in this discussion.)
So when you run "df -A" and look at the free space in the aggregate, that shows you how much space has not been promised to any flex volume. If the aggregate has snapshot reserve space, then any unused snap reserve space is also free space.
If you run "df" to see the free space in a flex volume, then that shows how many free blocks in the aggregate are promised to this volume. And any free space in the volume's snap reserve is also promised to the volume.
Therefore you need to add up the free space from "df -A" and the free space from each flex volume in the aggregate, including free space in the snap reserves, to calculate the total free space in the aggregate. If this is at least 10% of the total size of the aggregate, then you are probably in good shape.
This is kind of slick because one of your flex volumes can run at close to 100% full, but if there is sufficient free space in the aggregate then this does not hurt performance.
Steve Losen scl@virginia.edu phone: 434-924-0640
University of Virginia ITC Unix Support