[CentOS] Disk usage for small files in ext3 in CentOS 5

[Marko A. Jennings]

On Wed, March 11, 2009 5:51 pm, Nicolas Thierry-Mieg wrote:
>
> Filipe Brandenburger wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I noticed something unusual today.
>>
>> If I "du" a small file (couple of bytes) in CentOS 5, it tells me the
>> file is using 8kb, while I was expecting 4kb which is the block size
>> I'm using.
>>
>> I tried this on several CentOS 5 machines, both x86_64 and i386:
>>
>> $ echo test >test.txt
>> $ ls -l test.txt
>> -rw-rw-r-- 1 filbranden filbranden 5 Mar 11 17:24 test.txt
>> $ du -h test.txt
>> 8.0K	test.txt
> <snip>
>> I could not find any differences that would explain the behaviour.
>> Have you seen this before? Can you reproduce it on your systems? Do
>> you know how to get the CentOS 4 behaviour?
>
> strange.
> I don't reproduce on an x86_64 centos 5 machine:
> [nthierry at localhost ~]$ echo test >test.txt
> [nthierry at localhost ~]$ ls -l test.txt
> -rw-rw-r-- 1 nthierry nthierry 5 Mar 11 22:44 test.txt
> [nthierry at localhost ~]$ du -h test.txt
> 4.0K    test.txt
>
> I'm pretty sure I did nothing special when making the fs.

I just did it on a 32 bit machine and got 4.0K.  The file system was
created using default parameters.

Marko