>I have a CentOS 5.7 machine hosting a 16 TB XFS partition used to house >backups. The backups are run via rsync/rsnapshot and are large in terms of >the number of files: over 10 million each. > >Now the machine is not particularly powerful: it is 64-bit machine, dual >core CPU, 3 GB RAM. So perhaps this is a factor in why I am having the >following problem: once in awhile that XFS partition starts generating >multiple I/O errors, files that had content become 0 byte, directories >disappear, etc. Every time a reboot fixes that, however. So far I've looked >at logs but could not find a cause of precipitating event. > >Hence the question: has anyone experienced anything along those lines? What >could be the cause of this? In every situation like this that I have seen, it was hardware that never had adequate memory provisioned. Another consideration is you almost certainly wont be able to run a repair on that fs with so little ram. Finally, it would be interesting to know how you architected the storage hardware. Hardware raid, BBC, drive cache status, barrier status etc...