On Sun, 16 Jul 2006, Nick Holland wrote:
nope, you can still likely use multiple partitions. Break your backup job
into smaller chunks, put each chunk on its own partition. Or put each
machine on its own partition. Or ...
Interesting ideas. I didn't think that having the same amount of files
in many partitions will reduce the total time to fsck, does it really work
that way although it goes through the same amount of files?
BTW: Yes, the dmesg could very well have helped. If your disks were not
being handled properly or you had insufficient RAM, you can have HORRIBLE
problems with fsck performance, adding to your fsck time by a non-trivial
multiple. Your times sound excessive to me, but then, I don't think I have
that many files on a single partition.
Unfortunately the computer isn't at hand right now. I'll check the amount
of RAM and add some more if there isn't much. Would changing BUFCACHEPCT
help too? Because the computer is dedicated backup server so it can
take up all the memory as far as I'm concerned.
One idea which has been suggested is to use softupdates, and simply "force"
mounting of the volume at boot, and periodically, fsck the thing on your
schedule, to reclaim lost disk space. Yes, when you do run the fsck, you
will spend a lot of time waiting for it, but you will be able to schedule it.
Hmm, actually I am using softupdates. Doesn't it *ever* get corrupted with
softupdates even though there is a crash?
Keep in mind, partitions need not all be mounted in /etc/fstab, they can be
manually mounted "later" in rc.local. Why does your backup machine have to
boot "fast"? (I got one with way too little RAM, it needs to use swap to
fsck, but that's ok...I'm not in a hurry for this machine to come up).
Doing something else with it? Ok, just put the backup partition as noauto in
/etc/fstab, and fsck and mount (or just force-mount) the partition in
/etc/rc.local. Now, whatever it was that was bothering you about booting so
slowly is up quickly, and the backup partition will get mounted in due time.
Well, I have it set up so that it comes up once a day and after it
finishes doing backups it shuts down itself. So if it crashes and starting
up takes too much time the backup job won't fit the window it's supposed
to. I'm still working on the server and trying to find the best
solution for my needs. Luckily there hasn't been much use for the
backups since there hasn't been any real accidents or failures either ;-)
PS. Thanks to Nick and others for the advices and ideas.
Antti Harri
