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Traditionally, OneFS has used the SmartPools jobs to apply its file pool policies. To accomplish this, the SmartPools job goes to every file, and the SmartPoolsTree job goes to a tree of files. However, the scanning portion of these jobs can result in significant random impact to the cluster and lengthy execution times, particularly in the case of SmartPools job.
To address this, the FilePolicy job, included with OneFS 8.2, and later provides a faster, lower impact method for applying file pool policies than the full-blown SmartPools job. In conjunction with the IndexUpdate job, FilePolicy improves job scan performance by using a ‘file system index’, or changelist, to find files needing policy changes, rather than a full tree scan. This dramatically decreases the amount of locking and metadata scanning work the job is required to perform, reducing impact on CPU and disk - albeit at the expense of not doing everything that SmartPools does. The FilePolicy job enforces just the SmartPools file pool policies, as opposed to the storage pool settings. For example, FilePolicy does not deal with changes to storage pools or storage pool settings, such as:
However, the vast majority of the time SmartPools and FilePolicy perform the same work. Disabled by default, FilePolicy supports the full range of file pool policy features, reports the same information, and provides the same configuration options as the SmartPools job. Since FilePolicy is a changelist-based job, it performs best when run frequently - once or multiple times a day, depending on the configured file pool policies, data size and rate of change.