[CentOS] weird XFS problem

Joseph L. Casale jcasale at activenetwerx.com
Sun Jan 22 19:56:16 UTC 2012


>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...


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