On May 3, 2012, at 2:56 PM, Chris Schanzle wrote:

> On 05/03/2012 02:23 PM, aurfalien wrote:
>> On May 3, 2012, at 2:11 PM, Florian Philipp wrote:
>> 
>>> Am 03.05.2012 20:01, schrieb aurfalien:
>>>> Hi all,
>>>> 
>>>> I never really paid attention to this but a file on an NFS mount is
>>>> showing 64M in size, but when copying the file to a local drive, it
>>>> shows 2.5MB in size.
>>>> 
>>>> My NFS server is hardware Raided with a volume stripe size of 128K
>>>> were the volume size is 20TB, my local disk is about 500GB.
>>>> 
>>>> Is this due to my stripe size?
>>>> 
>>>> Nuggets are appreciated.
>>>> 
>>>> - aurf
>>> Is it a sparse file? What exact command did you use to calculate the
>>> file size?
>>> 
>>> Regards,
>>> Florian Philipp
>>> 
>> By the way, this is only across NFS as when ssh'd into the server, the file size shows 2.5M, same as the clients when its local so its seems NFS is the culprit.
>> 
>> I have r/wsize tweaked but thats it.
>> 
>> Any ideas?
>> 
>> - aurf
> 
> RHEL 5 and 6 'cp' utility enables 'crude heuristic' sparse file detection ('man ls').  compare results with:
> 
> cp --sparse=never /nfsserver/file var/tmp/
> 
> and without the --sparse option.
> 
> the 'stat' utility is also handy to compare actual disk blocks used vs byte size.  Most filesytems default to 4 KB or eight 512-byte blocks.
> 
> 'ls -sl' also shows disk blocks (usually in KB, not 'filesystem blocks') used in first column of output.
> 
> NFS options or RAID block size won't matter here, but the NFS file server's *filesystem* block size can make a difference of how many disk blocks are actually used on the disk (local or remote).  E.g., one of our NFS servers has a 32K filesystem block size.  A one-byte file takes 32K of disk space on that box.

Hi all,

It was my fstab mount option of allocsize=64m that caused this issue.

Just wanted to report back.

Thanks to all who responded to my call for help, I very much appreciate it.

- aurf
>