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Date:      Thu, 13 Nov 2008 10:57:44 -0600
From:      Kevin Day <toasty@dragondata.com>
To:        =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Javier_Mart=EDn_Rueda?= <jmrueda@diatel.upm.es>
Cc:        freebsd-fs@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: UFS Snapshot lock time
Message-ID:  <CCDF25A5-3933-4F08-B39E-1BDF2D4DCDA5@dragondata.com>
In-Reply-To: <491C51A7.8080000@diatel.upm.es>
References:  <6EEFB17C-10DF-4CCD-AB07-83B4B75D033F@dragondata.com> <491C51A7.8080000@diatel.upm.es>

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On Nov 13, 2008, at 10:11 AM, Javier Mart=EDn Rueda wrote:
> Just a word of caution: I used to do this in some different machines =20=

> (taking periodic snapshots and leaving a few around), and after a =20
> few days or weeks the system would lock up. Any process accessing =20
> the filesystem would block in "ufs" or something like that. After =20
> rebooting, fsck would report fatal errors and I had to do fsck -y in =20=

> order to fix them with plenty of scary messages about truncated =20
> inodes, unexpected inconsistencies, and so on. This happened in =20
> several 6.x releases, on different machines, and both under i386 or =20=

> amd64. Eventually, I gave up.
>
> I strongly suggest you try taking hourly snapshots in a non-=20
> production system first for a few weeks, and see if you experience =20
> this kind of problems. Sorry to be a party-pooper.
>
> It looks as if keeping more than one snapshot eventually is =20
> problematic. Taking single snapshots for dump has never been a =20
> problem, though.
>

We definitely saw this problem in 6.x. Any reboot after a snapshot =20
would be a mess of fsck fun for a few hours, usually resulting in us =20
losing stuff. But, 7.0 has cured that for me.

So far hourly/daily snapshots on any of the 7.0 boxes we've tried it =20
on has worked, it's just so slow it's unusable.  I'd like to think =20
it's just being slow because it's being very careful. :)

-- Kevin




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