From some foggy memories I thought I would "improve" the default settings when creating a Linux partition and increased the inode size to 1024, and also turned on -O bigalloc ("This ext4 feature enables clustered block allocation").
Now, though, I can't find any concrete benefits to these settings cited on the net, and I see that with 20% disk usage I'm already using 15% of the inodes.
So should I simply reformat the partition, or is there a positive to look on (or to use as justification)? E.g. for directories with lots of files?
Best Answer
Larger inodes are useful if you have many files with a large amount of metadata. The smallest inode size has room for classical metadata: permissions, timestamps, etc., as well as the address of a few blocks for regular files, or the target of short symbolic links. Larger inodes can store extended attributes such as access control lists and SELinux contexts. If there is not enough room for the extended attributes in the inode, they have to be stored in a separate block, which makes opening the file or reading its metadata slower.
Hence you should use a larger inode size if you're planning on having large amounts of extended attributes such as complex ACLs, or if you're using SELinux. SELinux is the primary motivation for larger inodes.