> On Jan 23, 2015, at 12:53 PM, Ingo Schwarze <schwa...@usta.de> wrote:
> 
> Hi Predrag,
> 
> Predrag Punosevac wrote on Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 03:24:00PM -0500:
> 
>> I was following this discussion with the great interest but without
>> intend to participate in it until today.
>> 
>> Namely one of my OpenBSD servers (5.6 sparc64) runs Mollify and last
>> night I received an e-mail from an angry user who could not upload files
>> (the upload will fail or upload the file with file size zero). After
>> running df I noticed that /tmp was 100% full (4GB used) but the size of
>> individual files was only 12Kb.
> 
> That is unlikely to be due to softdep.  The usual reason for a file
> system to be actually full and seemingly almost empty at the same
> time is somebody doing the following sequence of operations:
> 
> - open(2) a file for writing
> - writing a lot of data until the file system is full
> - unlink(2) the file
> - keep the process running that open(2)'ed it
> - let that process keep the file open and *not* close(2) it
> 
> Specifically, in /tmp, anybody can do that.
> 
>> I thought for a second and I remember seeing this with HAMMER on DF.
> 
> The above works with almost any file system.
> 
>> Long story short I checked /etc/fstab and
>> sure enough I had rw,softdep next to each partition including tmp. I
>> removed softdep rebooted the sytem and /tmp usage dropped to 0%.
> 
> That's not likely to be related to softdep either.  Chances are
> just rebooting would have solved the issue as well - simply because
> rebooting terminates all running processes, and consequently closes
> all open files.
> 
> What you should have done instead was run fstat(1), look for processes
> having files open in /tmp, use ls(1) -iRa /tmp to find the inode
> numbers of linked files in /tmp, and kill the processes having files
> open that were *not* linked until you found the one having the big
> file open - and then have a friendly talk with the responsible user,
> if any, or figure out what went wrong in case some daemon process
> caused the issue.
> 
>> My questions is which partitions should be mounted with softdep
>> option?
> 
> I'm not an expert on that and hardly ever use softdep, but i'd say
> on file systems where file create/delete performance is *critically*
> important, performace has been clearly demonstrated to be insufficient
> without softdep, and you consider data loss harmless.
> 
>> Is there a way to prune metadata which will save me for problems like
>> the one I encountered last night.
> 
> I'm not convinced that's a good question to ask.
> 
> Yours,
>  Ingo
> 



This email/post has some very good information in it.  Thanks


-Nex6

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