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Date:      Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:43:26 -0700
From:      Doug Barton <dougb@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Aditya Sarawgi <sarawgi.aditya@gmail.com>
Cc:        fs@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: ext2fs now extremely slow
Message-ID:  <4CD201AE.3040409@FreeBSD.org>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTi=iTCG4aO-KO_gy7fp_96KcZ_TCyNk5OkLZUHV3@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <20100929031825.L683@besplex.bde.org>	<20100929084801.M948@besplex.bde.org>	<20100929041650.GA1553@aditya>	<201009290917.05269.jhb@freebsd.org>	<20100929202526.GA1564@aditya>	<4CD0A3E8.4080304@FreeBSD.org> <AANLkTi=iTCG4aO-KO_gy7fp_96KcZ_TCyNk5OkLZUHV3@mail.gmail.com>

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On 11/03/10 16:38, Aditya Sarawgi wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 5:21 AM, Doug Barton<dougb@freebsd.org>  wrote:

>> Is anything happening with this?  I recently built a new system that is
>> multi-booting windows, freebsd, and ubuntu. I chose ext[23]fs for my /home
>> partition so that I could share unix'y stuff between freebsd and linux, but
>> I'm having both performance and stability problems, and today (fortunately
>> for the first time, and fortunately recoverable) I had actual data loss. I'm
>> happy to be a guinea pig for new code if people are reasonably sure that it
>> will help, but if the situation doesn't improve I will have to reformat.
>>
>
> Are you suffering from these problems on CURRENT ?

Yes.

> Can you please elaborate
> on the performance and stability issue you are facing ? Any specific scenario ?

What I did was create a fairly large (37G) /home and put all the stuff 
I'd like to have access to from all 3 systems, like svn, my ports tree, 
etc. I also ended up putting my obj directory there because I created my 
/usr/local a little smaller than I should have and after installing 
gnome I ran out of room. :)

I should also point out that this is on a brand new desktop system that 
was donated by a FreeBSD user. It's a C2D running at 3.17G, 4G RAM, and 
a fast 250G disk. I'm running amd64 -current. Everything disk intensive 
(updating ports with csup, updating my svn trees, etc.) is slower on 
this system than it was on my laptop where all the same stuff was on 
UFS2. Bruce's message that started this thread alluded to the problems, 
my experience has been similar.

Regarding stability, sometimes (but not always) when I'm doing the above 
listed disk-intensive things on an otherwise idle system I've had the 
system lock up. Not panic, not reboot, just wedge. I'm running X when 
this happens, so I'm not 100% sure that the disk activity is the 
culprit, but it seems very suspicious. Yesterday was a very bad day, I 
had to do 3 tries to get all the way through a buildworld/kernel, mostly 
because the last 2 crashes resulted in my /usr/src (which is actually 
/home/svn/head) and /usr/obj (/home/obj-9) directories getting corrupted 
respectively. Today (running r214694) has actually been quite good, 
although I haven't tried a buildworld yet.

> You can test Zheng's preallocation patch for ext2fs, there is a
> serious lack of testers for that.

I would be happy to do that, but my reading of this thread last month 
didn't produce a clear "try this version of the patch" neon sign. 
Various people referred to suggestions, updates, etc. If someone could 
provide a URL for the right patch to try, as well as a suggestion for 
benchmarking methodology, I'll be glad to do so.

>> On a related note, is there any way to use the journaling features of ext3fs
>> in FreeBSD? When I boot the linux partition it's treating the fs as ext3fs,
>> but AFAICS we only have ext2fs capabilities.
>>
>
> Journaling is difficult to bring in, especially if one is planning to
> have a BSDL version.

Ok. I can live with accessing the stuff as ext2 from FreeBSD, and I can 
even live with a minor performance penalty. What I can't live with is 
instability and/or data corruption; and it should go without saying that 
our users should not have to live with that either.


Thanks for the response,

Doug

-- 

	Nothin' ever doesn't change, but nothin' changes much.
			-- OK Go

	Breadth of IT experience, and depth of knowledge in the DNS.
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