SUMMARY: Disk Quotas and SYstem Performance

From: Mike Jipping (jipping@cs.hope.edu)
Date: Tue Jun 14 1994 - 20:02:08 CDT


Thanks to the responsers. Unfortuately, no real consensus came out.
Here's the rerun of the question:

> I need some advice on how disk quota enforcement impacts system
> performance.
>
> We have been avoiding implementing disk quotas for some time now, but we
> have some users that consistently flout the reccommendations for disk
> space use. Thus, I feel disk quotas are something we need.
>
> However, I read in the manual that there is a "slight" system performance
> hit using quotas. Combine this with the fact that some of our systems
> are still SPARCstation 1's with 16MBytes of memory AND we are running
> Solaris 2.3. NOW I'm *real* worried about performance degradation.

>From the responses, it would appear that people (a) have not really
checked on how quotas impact their systems, or (b) assumed quotas were
bad and implemented scripts to be "disk police". No one had strong
claims any which way; the folks that used quotas said the performance hit
was "slight" or "not very bad".

One bit of advice that came out was only use quotas where you need them
-- i.e., on user space.

So I suppose we'll just try 'em and find out.

Thanks go to
     rmills@ccd.harris.com (Richard C. Mills)
     Ric Anderson <ric@Artisoft.COM>
     Mike Rembis 66520 <ebumfr@ebu.ericsson.se>
     hendefd@mail.auburn.edu
     edsdrd!srr@edsr.eds.com (Steve Remsing)
     mcostel@mach10.utica1.kaman.com (Mark Costello)
     David Lee <T.D.Lee@durham.ac.uk>
     edsdrd!srr@edsr.eds.com (Steve Remsing)
     davee@lightning.mitre.org (David N. Edwards)
     anderson@neon.mitre.org (Mark S. Anderson)

      Mike Jipping
      Hope College Department of Computer Science
      jipping@cs.hope.edu (BITNET: JIPPING@HOPE)

      "Daddy, hand me the garage door mouse."
                               -- my four-year-old daughter trying to
                                  reach the garage door opener (after
                                  using too much "educational" sofwtare).
 



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