[CentOS] strange speed of mkfs Centos vs. Debian

[Dennis Jacobfeuerborn]

On 13.11.2013 11:36, Götz Reinicke - IT Koordinator wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm testing a storage system and different network settings and I'm
> faced with a strange phenomen.
>
> Doing a mkfs.ext4 on the centos server lasts 11 minutes.
>
> The same mkfs.ext4 command on the debian installation is done in 20 seconds.
>
> It is formatting a 14 TB 10Gbit ISCSI Target.
>
> It is the same server. Centos and debian are installed on different
> internal harddisks.
>
> Any explanations why debian is so f*** fast? Any hint?

Is it possible that you use a relatively recent debian version compared 
to the older centos 5/6 versions available? If so you might want to look 
into the "lazy_itable_init" option for mkfs.ext4 which is probabaly used 
in the debian case but not the centos case (but will probably be used in 
RHEL7).

Regards,
   Dennis