Combine remote samba mounts into Merger FS over Wireguard questions.

[neilanthonystuckey]

Is it bad practice to combine a bunch of samba mounts that are remote connected over Wire-guard to my server with MergerFS ? My server is running Debian 12 i have a hefty system with 12th gen i7 cpu, 64GB ram and M.2 drive for OS. My network is 2.5 gbe to and from the server and remote Open Media Vault both have fiber internet at each location. The remote system hosting samba mounts is Open Media Vault latest version all disks are formatted Ext4. I believe the block size is default 4 KB (4096 bytes) on all disks. I get near full disk speeds over the internet on individual samba mounts when testing the mounts with fio. Obviously a bit of overhead with Wire-guard but not a big hit on performance. Things do slow down with MergerFS which is expected and i am fine with it. I read over the tweaking performance documentation but its a bit over my head. I have not noticed much improvement enabling or disabling options in my fstab entry for MergerFS that are mentioned in the docs. Could you recommend a best practice fstab options for MergerFS with this kind of setup ? Would there be any samba options to consider to help performance ?

Here is my fstab

/mnt/smb/sdb1:/mnt/smb/sdc1:/mnt/smb/sdd1:/mnt/smb/sde1:/mnt/smb/sdf1:/mnt/sda1:/mnt/sdb1 /mnt/pool fuse.mergerfs defaults,nonempty,allow_other,cache.files=partial,readahead=1024,use_ino,xattr=noattr,moveonenospc=true,category.create=mfs,dropcacheonclose=true,minfreespace=100G,fsname=mergerfs,uid=1000,gid=1000,exclude-path=/mnt/sdb1/backups:/mnt/sdb1/dockers:/mnt/sdb1/photos:/mnt/sda1/downloads:/mnt/sda1/vidz 0 0

[trapexit]

There is nothing more for me to add that isn't in the docs. That said you are doing unnecessary things

https://trapexit.github.io/mergerfs/quickstart/
https://trapexit.github.io/mergerfs/config/deprecated_options/

• defaults is not needed
• nonempty is not needed, its not needed
• allow_other is not needed, its deprecated
• cache.files should probably be off as explained in the docs
• You should not be setting uid and gid and I do not offer support for that. mergerfs is not designed to support overriding of uid/gid.
• What is "exclude-path"? That is not a mergerfs option.

I'm not an expert on Samba setups.

[neilanthonystuckey]

Thanks for the fast support !

What is "exclude-path"? That is not a mergerfs option.

I was trying to find a way to add a couple local disks but exclude folders from mergerFS. Is it possible ?

[trapexit]

As I say in the docs: if it isn't in the docs it doesn't exist. https://trapexit.github.io/mergerfs/tips_notes/

No, there is no whiteout behavior in mergerfs. https://trapexit.github.io/mergerfs/#non-features

[neilanthonystuckey]

Thanks for the hard work with MergerFS and your fast support.