Keith Bainbridge composed on 2024-02-17 15:44 (UTC+1100):Yes the / partitions are btrfs
Several years ago, I installed Debian (9?) using btrfs for root (and boot?). I failed to understand that btrfs required regular maintenance and/or I was too lazy to figure it out and do it. After a few months, the systems started running slowly and I seem to recall conflicting reports of storage usage. I STFW, RTFM, etc., and tried doing the maintenance by hand. I quickly came to the conclusion that I needed to run `btrfs balance start ...` many, many times. So, I wrote Perl script and let it hammer on the file systems for hours at a time (!). I was able to rescue most of the disks to decent performance, but one was especially bad and I was only able to rescue it to marginal performance. I continued running btrfs for a while and running the Perl script periodically. Ultimatedly, I backed up, put in fresh OS disks, and installed using ext4. This was one of my reasons to use FreeBSD and ZFS for my SOHO servers.
David