Another reply I had sent to Chris directly.

Your executive summary is correct. The other wrinkle is that in indirect blocks that are not embedded in inodes there is a 16 byte header embedded in the indirect block. As you note this makes the fan-out at each level 510 instead of 512.

John Edwards

-----Original Message----- From: Chris Thompson [mailto:cet1@cus.cam.ac.uk] Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2005 4:14 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Moving to flexible volumes increases number of index blocks

It turns out that moving files from traditional volumes to flexible volumes makes them "grow", in the sense that they have more index blocks, as accounted in "ls -s" output, and charged against quotas. I think it's a bit sneaky of NetApp to have done this without mentioning it in their conversion documents.

Executive summary: disk block addresses in inodes and in index blocks have changed from 4-byte to 8-byte objects. (That's conjecture, of course, but it seems to explain the observed effects.)

Files <= 64 bytes use no blocks (that is unchanged). Files <= 32 KB (used to be 64 KB) use ceil(size/4KB) data blocks only, no index blocks. Files up to c. 2 MB (used to be 4 MB) use ceil(size/4KB) data blocks and one 4 KB index block Files up to c. 4 MB (used to be 8 MB) use ceil(size/4KB) data blocks and two 4 KB index blocks ...

The main expansion effect comes from files in the 32KB+1 to 64KB size range, where the extra index block is a significant proportion of the total.

Has anyone worked out the new formulae in nit-picking detail? I say "c. 2 MB" above because the transition actually occurs a few blocks before 2 MB: I think there may be some overhead in the index blocks so that not quite 512 addresses will fit in them.

-- Chris Thompson Email: cet1@cam.ac.uk