From owner-freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG Mon May 21 21:11:58 2007 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.org Delivered-To: freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 98DFC16A469 for ; Mon, 21 May 2007 21:11:58 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from gad@FreeBSD.org) Received: from smtp7.server.rpi.edu (smtp7.server.rpi.edu [128.113.2.227]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5E55D13C4CA for ; Mon, 21 May 2007 21:11:58 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from gad@FreeBSD.org) Received: from [128.113.24.47] (gilead.netel.rpi.edu [128.113.24.47]) by smtp7.server.rpi.edu (8.13.1/8.13.1) with ESMTP id l4LJv1WF007883; Mon, 21 May 2007 15:57:02 -0400 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <829849.56057.qm@web63013.mail.re1.yahoo.com> References: <829849.56057.qm@web63013.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 15:57:01 -0400 To: Gore Jarold , freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.org From: Garance A Drosehn Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" X-RPI-SA-Score: undef - spam scanning disabled X-CanItPRO-Stream: default X-Canit-Stats-ID: Bayes signature not available X-Scanned-By: CanIt (www . roaringpenguin . com) on 128.113.2.227 Cc: Subject: Re: VERY frustrated with FreeBSD/UFS stability - please help or comment... X-BeenThere: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Filesystems List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 21:11:58 -0000 At 9:19 AM -0700 5/21/07, Gore Jarold wrote: >(I love FreeBSD. This is not a troll. If all you >have to contribute is "stop spreading FUD" or "write >some code yourself" please accept my apologies.) Okay, I can believe that. No problem. >So my plea for help is as follows: > >a) am I really the only person in the world that moves >around millions of inodes throughout the day ? Am I >the only person in the world that has ever filled up a >snapshotted FS (or a quota'd FS, for that matter) ? >Am I the only person in the world that does a mass >deletion of several hundred thousand inodes several >times per day ? I think this is the main issue. I did have some problems with snapshots due to running out of disk-space, etc. But those were due to errors on my part, and were not "normal" operating practice. The few errors I have run into were pretty easy to avoid, simply by re-arranging my disk partitions and paying a little more attention to what I was doing. For instance, I found out that it's bad to automatically do a snapshot before an installworld, and then do multiple installworlds in the same day, while forgetting about all those snapshots building up. Sooner or later you have to run out of disk space, and it's really bad to do that in the middle of an installworld! But once I realized what the issue was, I switched to doing one snapshot per week, instead of one per installworld. I really had no practical reason for the snapshot-per-installworld, so it did not bother me to drop that. I imagine I've had days where I've deleted one hundred-thousand inodes in a day, but it would be rare. And it'd be even more rare that I'd remove several hundred-thousand inodes multiple times in the same day. The one time I was doing something like that, I put the most volatile data on a partition by itself, and I'd simply 'newfs' the partition instead of going through and removing each file. I didn't do that to avoid any bugs, I only did it because it was quicker, and I also knew it would get me back to the exact same starting point for my next run. And since part of what I was doing was benchmarking various things, it was important that each run had the exact same starting point. I think that your usage is just much larger than the "standard" freebsd user, so you're hitting edge-cases that the rest of us are blissfully missing. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = drosehn@rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@FreeBSD.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Troy, NY; USA