Summary:
On some filesystems, pre-allocation can be a considerable
amount of space. xfs in our production environment pre-allocates by
1GB, for instance. By using fallocate to inform the kernel of our
expected file sizes, we eliminate this wasteage (that isn't recovered
until the file is closed which, in the case of LOG files, can be a
considerable amount of time).
Test Plan:
created an xfs loopback filesystem, mounted with
allocsize=4M, and ran db_stress. LOG file without this change was 4M,
and with it it was 128k then grew to normal size.
Reviewers: dhruba
Reviewed By: dhruba
CC: adsharma, leveldb
Differential Revision: https://reviews.facebook.net/D7953