btrfs balancer does not have an impact on allocation [answered]

asked 2015-08-20 11:09:54 +0200

pawel gravatar image

updated 2015-08-23 15:44:15 +0200

hello there, my phone ran out of space, so i did a maintenance as described here:

https://together.jolla.com/question/30822/root-and-home-disks-full-and-causing-various-problems/

[edit 21.8.2015] of course i did a cleanup first :-) deleted ca. 2.5 GB

devel-su

btrfs-balancer allocation

returned a realy high value around 14763950080

allocation 100%

i did then btrfs-balancer balance twice

but

btrfs-balancer allocation is still returning the same high value of 14.....

running btrfs-balancer balance did not help. the allocation value toggles between 92% and 100%

btrfs-balancer balance -a 90 did help, now allocation went down to 82 %.

can anyone tell me why?

but it seems that after a while the allocation goes back to 100%, even though i have almost 3 GB free.

image description

[edit 23.8.2015] balancer had an effect after an deletion of another 3 GB's. using it with 7 GB (used) lead to an allocation of 75% (?!) and now the allocation seems to stay at this level and is not jumping back to 100%

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The question has been closed for the following reason "the question is answered, an answer was accepted" by pawel
close date 2015-08-30 14:21:21.709101

Comments

Do you mean the "Total" value with 14...? That value is your total disk space and that value is not supposed to change much. What should change is the ratio between "Total" and "Used", i.e. "Allocated". However it can only decrease if there is room on the filesystem for optimizations.

pycage ( 2015-08-20 14:06:38 +0200 )edit

If your memory is full, you need to delete files. Btrfs balance can't create more space than there is.

jollailija ( 2015-08-20 16:24:17 +0200 )edit

first thing i did was to delete file more then 2 GB were free then i did the excercise

pawel ( 2015-08-20 19:14:24 +0200 )edit

@pycage: i was not precise enough. both values were same 14... tallocation was 100% as i said. after deleting 2gb, result of balance toggles between 93 and 100%.

pawel ( 2015-08-21 21:59:40 +0200 )edit

What's the output if you run btrfs fi show?

ssahla ( 2015-08-21 22:31:49 +0200 )edit