Increase EXT3 format speed.
 

Dear all,

Â*

On certain USB MSC dongle, the mkfs.ext3 can take around 3 min for 4GB. It seems that the process is locked in sync function. Do you know how I could increase the speed of this process?


With mkfs.ext4 it’s about 1 min to format it …

Â*

Â*

Stéphane Cerveau

Software Engineer

scerveau@awox.com

Phone:
+33 4 99 53 27 39



93, Pierre Duhem

34000 Montpellier

FRANCE

Phone: +33 4 67 47 10 00


Fax:Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* +33 4 67 47 10 15





Â*






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Increase EXT3 format speed.
 

You can speed up mke2fs by reducing the inode count (-i or -N) if your average file size is over 8kB, reduce the journal size (-J size=4) and/or use the lazy_journal_init patch I posted recently, and/or use the lazy_itable_init option. I assume since format performance is important that you do it often and the risk of an uninitialized inode table is low.Â*
Or, you could use ext4, which is also faster at runtime, not just format time.Â*

Cheers, Andreas
On 2011-02-28, at 4:18, Stephane Cerveau <scerveau@awox.com> wrote:



Dear all,

Â*

On certain USB MSC dongle, the mkfs.ext3 can take around 3 min for 4GB. It seems that the process is locked in sync function. Do you know how I could increase the speed of this process?


With mkfs.ext4 it’s about 1 min to format it …

Â*

Â*

Stéphane Cerveau

Software Engineer

scerveau@awox.com

Phone:
+33 4 99 53 27 39



93, Pierre Duhem

34000 Montpellier

FRANCE

Phone: +33 4 67 47 10 00


Fax:Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* +33 4 67 47 10 15



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Â*






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Increase EXT3 format speed.
 

--On 28 February 2011 08:25:03 -0700 Andreas Dilger <adilger@dilger.ca>
wrote:




You can speed up mke2fs by reducing the inode count (-i or -N) if your
average file size is over 8kB, reduce the journal size (-J size=4) and/or
use the lazy_journal_init patch I posted recently, and/or use the
lazy_itable_init option. I assume since format performance is important
that you do it often and the risk of an uninitialized inode table is low.


Or, you could use ext4, which is also faster at runtime, not just format
time.


If you are doing this a lot, another alternative is to format a sparse file,
keep this between formats, and copy the sparse file on.

There are plenty of utilities to do that, including one here:
http://blog.alex.org.uk/2010/12/02/copying-sparse-files/

If you are quite sure your USB device is completely blank (i.e.
all sectors zero), run with -n, in which case it will only write
the non-zero sectors and read nothing. If you are not completely sure
your USB device is blank, don't run with -n, and discover that this will be
probably be slower than a straight format as it will have to read every
sector.

--
Alex Bligh

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Increase EXT3 format speed.
 

On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 12:18:59PM +0100, Stephane Cerveau wrote:
>
> On certain USB MSC dongle, the mkfs.ext3 can take around 3 min for
> 4GB. It seems that the process is locked in sync function. Do you
> know how I could increase the speed of this process?
>
> With mkfs.ext4 it's about 1 min to format it ...

What is the high-level problem that you are trying to solve? Is this
for testing purposes? Are you trying to do something for production?
Are these dongles new, or do they contain a previously generated
ext2/3/4 file system?

Depending on the answers to these questions, there are some short-cuts
you can take that will speed up mke2fs for ext3, but there are
downsides and they aren't safe in all situations (which is why they
are not the default). Ext4 has a way to initialize the inode table
lazily, after the file system is mounted, which is why it's faster to
use mke2fs.

- Ted

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