Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 19:25:12 +0100 From: John Ekins <john.ekins@brightview.com> To: Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Softupdates: df, du, sync and fsck [quite long] Message-ID: <20030628192512.7165a3bf.john.ekins@brightview.com> In-Reply-To: <3EFD113A.3060402@potentialtech.com> References: <20030627220033.5586e86b.john.ekins@brightview.com> <3EFD113A.3060402@potentialtech.com>
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Hello Bill, On Fri, 27 Jun 2003 23:53:30 -0400 Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com> wrote: -> I don't know what's wrong, but does unmounting and remounting the partition -> reclaim the lost space? Alas, I can't umount the partition, my guess is because it is unable to sync (nothing to do with open files, and no error message saying "device busy"). The command just doesn't return after I've issued it. -> If there's a LOT of inodes with problems, it could easily take a while to fix. -> Also, if you run fsck without specifying a filesystem to fix, it exhaustively -> checks all filesystems. So even if the problem is on /var, it might spend a -> long time checking /usr as well. You can work around this by calling fsck -> with the filesystem to check. I don't think it's to do with inodes or block size, etc. There's about 2M inodes on /var. A manual fsck on a dirty shutdown on this partition (ignoring the problem in hand) takes a couple of minutes. -> If these are production boxes, I'd recommend turning it off until you resolve -> the problem. Indeed, I tried that last night on one machine and it put the load through the roof(48). -> I don't know if this would qualify as "advice", but since nobody else -> seems to have any suggestions, I figured I'd throw my thoughts in. -> Are you using ATA or SCSI drives? SCSI. -> Does issuing a manual "sync" once you've stopped the spooling process help -> any? No. I'd already tried numerous syncs, and of course a clean shutdown tries that too. -> Are these all identical mobos ... possibly a BIOS update available? Haven't looked for an update, but I think they're all identical. -> These aren't IBM ATA drives are they? I had one of those give me grief for -> months (if you look in the archives, you should be able to find details on -> which drives caused problems). Alas not! They're straightforward Seagates, which in other machines we use (much lighter load) don't have this problem. -> Have you tried updating one of the machines to 4.8 to see if the problem -> has been fixed? I haven't tried that yet but will do so. I'm also going to test a 5.1R machine, perhaps the background fsck will help when I alas come to reboot. -> Like I said, not good advice, just some ideas for you. All advice and ideas are welcome. -> Bill Moran Cheers, John.
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