Trying to determine the correct number of XFS allocation groups for postgresql server on Linux
What is the partition size in gigabytes? I usually divide that by 4 in order to determine the number of XFS allocation groups. I've run into situations where I only had one allocation group, and had problems with repair with an error indicating that there wasn't another AG to refer to in the file repair process. Either way, I think the general rule is partition size/4. There's some level of parallelism when running I/O against multiple allocation groups. But I'm assuming there's diminishing return on that number, so anywhere between partitionsize/2 and partitionsize/4 is reasonable.
So for a 200GB partition named "partitionname" on /dev/sdb1, I'd probably use the following mkfs.xfs command sequence.
mkfs.xfs -f -L /partitionname -d agcount=50 -l size=128m,version=2 /dev/sdb1
Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFS#Allocation_groups
and http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1479435 where it is noted:
At least one allocation group is needed per 4 gigs of space...