Hi All We use CentOS 6.6 for our application. I have profiled the application and find that we have a heavy requirement in terms of Disk writes. On an average when our application operates at a certain load i can observe that the disk writes / second is around 2 Mbps (Average). The block size set is 4k ******************* [root at localhost ~]# blockdev --getbsz /dev/sda3 4096 ******************* OS , Kernel Version: ***************** [root at localhost ~]# uname -a Linux localhost 2.6.32-504.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Oct 15 04:27:16 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux [root at localhost ~]# cat /etc/*release CentOS release 6.6 (Final) CentOS release 6.6 (Final) CentOS release 6.6 (Final) ***************** File-System being used: ******************** [root at localhost ~]# df -T Filesystem Type 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda3 ext3 100934056 20298152 75508688 22% / /dev/sda1 ext3 198337 34459 153638 19% /boot tmpfs tmpfs 16440152 0 16440152 0% /dev/shm ********************* I have a few queries with respect to the block size being set in the system: 1. Is 4k the optimum block size considering the amount of writes / second the application performs ? 2. How do i find out the optimum block size given the application load in terms of reads / writes per second ? 3. If there is a better block size that i can use , Can you suggest one ? 4. What are the pros / Cons of changing the default block size ? 5. We use ext3 as the file system for the partition which has heavy writes per second , Should we migrate it to ext4 ? Any pros / cons for it ? Appreciate any response / pointers in this regard. Thanks Jatin