<samba:parameter name="strict allocate"
                 context="S"
				 type="boolean"
                 xmlns:samba="http://www.samba.org/samba/DTD/samba-doc">
<description>
    <para>This is a boolean that controls the handling of
    disk space allocation in the server. When this is set to <constant>yes</constant>
    the server will change from UNIX behaviour of not committing real
    disk storage blocks when a file is extended to the Windows behaviour
    of actually forcing the disk system to allocate real storage blocks
    when a file is created or extended to be a given size. In UNIX
    terminology this means that Samba will stop creating sparse files.</para>

    <para>This option is really designed for file systems that support
    fast allocation of large numbers of blocks such as extent-based file systems.
    On file systems that don't support extents (most notably ext3) this can
    make Samba slower. When you work with large files over >100MB on file
    systems without extents you may even run into problems with clients
    running into timeouts.</para>

    <para>When you have an extent based filesystem it's likely that we can make
    use of unwritten extents which allows Samba to allocate even large amounts
    of space very fast and you will not see any timeout problems caused by
    strict allocate. With strict allocate in use you will also get much better
    out of quota messages in case you use quotas. Another advantage of
    activating this setting is that it will help to reduce file
    fragmentation.</para>

    <para>To give you an idea on which filesystems this setting might currently
    be a good option for you: XFS, ext4, btrfs, ocfs2 on Linux and JFS2 on
    AIX support unwritten extents. On Filesystems that do not support it,
    preallocation is probably an expensive operation where you will see reduced
    performance and risk to let clients run into timeouts when creating large
    files. Examples are ext3, ZFS, HFS+ and most others, so be aware if you
    activate this setting on those filesystems.</para>

</description>

<value type="default">no</value>
</samba:parameter>
