here's an example for fsck on a largish volume with a lot of files:
# df -hi /nfs/archive
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted
on
/dev/sd0e 3.6T 2.3T 1.2T 67% 3900811 119021683 3%
/nfs/archive
# umount /nfs/archive
# \time -l fsck -f /dev/sd0e
** /dev/rsd0e
** File system is already clean
** Last Mounted on /nfs/archive
** Phase 1 - Check Blocks and Sizes
** Phase 2 - Check Pathnames
** Phase 3 - Check Connectivity
** Phase 4 - Check Reference Counts
** Phase 5 - Check Cyl groups
3900811 files, 307622602 used, 179239875 free (49355 frags, 22398815
blocks, 0.0% fragmentation)
1966.70 real 14.68 user 36.78 sys
137096 maximum resident set size
0 average shared memory size
0 average unshared data size
0 average unshared stack size
3561095 minor page faults
4 major page faults
0 swaps
0 block input operations
5 block output operations
0 messages sent
0 messages received
0 signals received
526407 voluntary context switches
30 involuntary context switches
#
note that with nearly 4 million files, the amount of time required by fsck
increased dramatically(over 30 minutes) but memory usage increased much
less (only 137MB). this particular system has 12GB RAM but doesn't appear
to ever use much of it. the sd0 device is a 6TB RAID10 array (4x 3TB
drives) on an Areca ARC1110 PCI-X controller (in a 64-bit 133MHz PCI-X
slot), partitioned with 1/3 of the space on sd0d and the remaining 2/3 on
sd0e. /dev/sd0d was mostly idle (although still mounted) while fsck was
running.
-ken
On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 5:35 PM, Jan Stary <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Feb 10 17:48:22, [email protected] wrote:
> > On 2015-02-10, yary <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > > I know FFS2 can handle that size easily, but I'm worried about fsck
> > > taking forever. This machine will have 1.5GB RAM, from what I've read
> > > that's not enough memory to fsck a 4TB volume without painful
> > > swapping.
> >
> > It vastly depends on the number of files you have on there.
>
> And if you know in advance that the files will be large
> ("video editing"?) and there will not be many of them,
> you might benefit from 'newfs -i' (and other options)
> when creating the file system.