ance is done at every metadata block allocation. For every block group, we fail to set up a cluster, and after failing on them all up to twice, we fall back to the much slower unclustered allocation. To make matters worse, before the unclustered allocation, we try to create new block groups until we reach the 1% threshold, which introduces additional bitmaps and thus block groups that we'll iterate over at each metadata block request. æ’§A•.x