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-rw-r--r--docs-xml/smbdotconf/tuning/strictallocate.xml24
1 files changed, 18 insertions, 6 deletions
diff --git a/docs-xml/smbdotconf/tuning/strictallocate.xml b/docs-xml/smbdotconf/tuning/strictallocate.xml
index 2606f2028b..88ebfb0948 100644
--- a/docs-xml/smbdotconf/tuning/strictallocate.xml
+++ b/docs-xml/smbdotconf/tuning/strictallocate.xml
@@ -10,14 +10,26 @@
of actually forcing the disk system to allocate real storage blocks
when a file is created or extended to be a given size. In UNIX
terminology this means that Samba will stop creating sparse files.
- This can be slow on some systems.</para>
+ This can be slow on some systems. When you work with large files like
+ >100MB or so you may even run into problems with clients running into
+ timeouts.</para>
- <para>When strict allocate is <constant>no</constant> the server does sparse
- disk block allocation when a file is extended.</para>
+ <para>When you have an extent based filesystem it's likely that we can make
+ use of unwritten extents which allows Samba to allocate even large ammounts
+ of space very fast and you will not see any timeout problems caused by
+ strict allocate. With strict allocate in use you will also get much better
+ out of quota messages in case you use quotas. Another advantage of
+ activating this setting is that it will help to reduce file
+ fragmentation.</para>
+
+ <para>To give you an idea on which filesystems this setting might currently
+ be a good option for you: XFS, ext4, btrfs, ocfs2 on Linux and JFS2 on
+ AIX support unwritten extents. On Filesystems that do not support it,
+ preallocation is probably an expensive operation where you will see reduced
+ performance and risk to let clients run into timeouts when creating large
+ files. Examples are ext3, ZFS, HFS+ and most others, so be aware if you
+ activate this setting on those filesystems.</para>
- <para>Setting this to <constant>yes</constant> can help Samba return
- out of quota messages on systems that are restricting the disk quota
- of users.</para>
</description>
<value type="default">no</value>