by CharlyBr | Optimization, Uncategorized in ,

Set the number of reserved filesystem blocks of a disk

The default value of “Reserved block count” takes 5% of usable disk. On a large fs like 813G, it represents about 40G.

These blocks are reserved to the super user to recover from situations where user processes fill up filesystems.
It is absolutely safe to reduce this space to one hundred or so MB.

  • check disk space of our filesystem:
$ df -h /dev/sda4
/dev/sda4             813G  418G  354G  55% /home

Before the tuning, we have 354G free.

  • check the current number of reserved blocks:
$ tune2fs -l /dev/sda4
...
Reserved block count:     10816865
...

Change this number to 20000.
The blocksize is 4096, 20000 blocks represent about 80MB.

$ tune2fs -r20000 /dev/sda4
...
Reserved block count:     20000
...
  • check disk space of our filesystem:
$ df -h /dev/sda4
/dev/sda4             813G  418G  395G  52% /home

We now have a gain of 40GB of free space!