[Gluster-users] Gluster striping taking up too much space

[Brian Candler]

On Fri, Jul 06, 2012 at 11:48:15AM -0700, Khawaja Shams wrote:
>     Hello,
>       We redid our setup with ext4 instead of xfs - and it seems to work
>    fine. It sounds like there may be a bug in the integration of xfs +
>    glusterfs.

It's XFS doing pre-allocation of space (i.e. it doesn't expect you to leave
holes in the file, which is how glusterfs striping works). There's a mount
option to disable preallocation.

Are you sure that striping is what you want, rather than simple
distribution?  It's appropriate if you have a small number of huge files,
but if you are throwing a large number of small to medium-sized files
around, distribution may be better. Each file then sits on a single
filesystem; if you lose one brick, at least you haven't lost all your files.