Robert Nichols wrote:
Filipe Brandenburger wrote:
Found it! It's not related to CentOS 4 or 5 (I found a C4 machine in which small files took 8kb of diskspace and a C5 machine in which small files took 4kb). It's related to SELinux being enabled or not. Casually most of my C4 machines had SELinux disabled and most of my C5 have it enabled. Now I dug out some machines with the opposite config and I checked it out.
I believe if SELinux is enabled, it will use extended attributes to store the file's SELinux context (you can see it with "ls -Z", for some reason you cannot see it with "getfattr -d", I was expecting that to be possible). I guess when the file has extended attributes it will use an additional block to store them. That basically doubles the storage requirements if you have millions of tiny files...
It shouldn't be doing that.
In any case, I can confirm that selinux is disabled on the x86_64 C5 box where I tested yesterday and reported 4kb usage. And I see the same on another similar box (4kb file, selinux disabled on x86_64 C5).