Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 12:48:19 -0500 From: Brooks Davis <brooks@freebsd.org> To: Gore Jarold <gore_jarold@yahoo.com> Cc: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Subject: Re: VERY frustrated with FreeBSD/UFS stability - please help or comment... Message-ID: <20070521174818.GA64826@lor.one-eyed-alien.net> In-Reply-To: <829849.56057.qm@web63013.mail.re1.yahoo.com> References: <829849.56057.qm@web63013.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
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--VbJkn9YxBvnuCH5J Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 09:19:02AM -0700, Gore Jarold wrote: >=20 > I have been extremely dissatisfied with the stability > of the FreeBSD UFS/UFS2 implementation throughout all > of 5.x and 6.x. I can take any random release from > this period and halt/lock/crash it with basic and > uninteresting filesystem operations. In early 5.x it > was simply big inode movements from disk to disk.=20 > Later it was multiple snapshots. In 6.x any number of > seemingly benign operations (filling a disk, using > quotas, dense (lots of inodes) deletes and copies) and > each time some or all of these problems are solved in > one release, slightly different versions of the same > problem show up in the next one. For instance, > snapshot stability got a lot better from 6.0 to 6.2, > but now 6.2 has problems just moving and deleting lots > of inodes. >=20 > I am running _nothing interesting_. I don't even run > snapshots anymore ... and as you can see from other > posts, I am crashing/halting/etc. all over the place.=20 > This is on systems that do nothing but TCP (scp, ftp) > file service and some big (rm, cp) movements of inodes > once in a while. In other words, my setup is as > vanilla as it gets. >=20 > It's not the hardware (happens on 3ware, adaptec, > etc.) (different systems). >=20 > It's not my esoteric config (I take generic kernel and > just delete the devices I don't use) ... also I have > no custom sysctls/loader.conf >=20 > So I am at my wits end. Since early 2004 there has > not been a single release version of FreeBSD (well, > except _perhaps_ 6.1-RELEASE ...) that I don't > regularly knock over with _simple, generic movements > of files_. >=20 > So my plea for help is as follows: >=20 > 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) ?=20 > Am I the only person in the world that does a mass > deletion of several hundred thousand inodes several > times per day ? >=20 > OR: >=20 > b) am I just stupid ? Is everyone doing this, and > there is 3 pages of sysctls and kernel tunes that > everyone does to their system when they are going to > use it this way ? Am I just naive for taking a > release and paring down GENERIC and attempting to run > as-is out of the box without major tuning ? >=20 > If so, can I see those tunes/sysctls ? >=20 > I am _really_ hoping that it is (b) ... I would much > rather look back on all of this frustration as my own > fault than have the burden of proving all of this (as > I will no doubt be called upon to do). (1) >=20 > Thanks. Please add your comments... I'd say it's certaintly (a). Consider that a full source tree contains a few under 85K files so that's a reasionable bound on average workloads. Deliberatly producing a kernel that required tuning to just us the APIs without crashing would be stupid and we wouldn't go it without a very good reason and very large warnings all over the place. Lousy performance might be expected, but crashing wouldn't be. > (1) just load up 6.2 and cp/rm a few million inodes > around. Or turn on quotas and fill your filesystem > up. Kaboom. It's not clear to me what you mean by "cp/rm a few million inodes around." The organization of those inodes into files and directories could conceviably have a major impact on the problem. If you could provide a script that fails for you, that would really help. -- Brooks --VbJkn9YxBvnuCH5J Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (FreeBSD) iD8DBQFGUdtiXY6L6fI4GtQRAieyAKCCJvWlq6utDMgzvpSz+UpVG4dQ2ACfRNzl Y+PAEfyzR23shzuDLvxMR5w= =h8VM -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --VbJkn9YxBvnuCH5J--
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