Now that 64-bit e2fsck can run to completion on a (newly-minted, never mounted) filesystem, here are some numbers. They must be taken with a large grain of salt of course, given the unrealistict situation, but they might be reasonable lower bounds of what one might expect. First, the disks are 300GB SCSI 15K rpm - there are 28 disks per RAID controller and they are striped into 2TiB volumes (that's a limitation of the hardware). 16 of these volumes are striped together using LVM, to make a 32TiB volume. The machine is a four-slot quad core AMD box with 128GB of memory and dual-port FC adapters. The filesystem was created with default values for everything, except that the resize_inode feature is turned off. I cleared caches before the run. # time e2fsck -n -f /dev/mapper/bigvg-bigvol e2fsck 1.41.4-64bit (17-Apr-2009) Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes Pass 2: Checking directory structure Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity Pass 4: Checking reference counts Pass 5: Checking group summary information /dev/mapper/bigvg-bigvol: 11/2050768896 files (0.0% non-contiguous), 128808243/8203075584 blocks real 23m13.725s user 23m8.172s sys 0m4.323s Most of the time (about 22 minutes) is in pass 5. I was taking snapshots of /proc/<pid of e2fsck>/statm every 10 seconds during the run[1]. It starts out like this: 27798 3293 217 42 0 3983 0 609328 585760 263 42 0 585506 0 752059 728469 272 42 0 728237 0 752059 728469 272 42 0 728237 0 752059 728469 272 42 0 728237 0 752059 728469 272 42 0 728237 0 752059 728469 272 42 0 728237 0 752059 728469 272 42 0 728237 0 752059 728469 272 42 0 728237 0 717255 693666 273 42 0 693433 0 717255 693666 273 42 0 693433 0 717255 693666 273 42 0 693433 0 .... and stays at that level for most of the run (the drop occurs a short time after pass 5 starts). Here is what it looks like at the end: .... 717255 693666 273 42 0 693433 0 717255 693666 273 42 0 693433 0 717255 693666 273 42 0 693433 0 717499 693910 273 42 0 693677 0 717499 693910 273 42 0 693677 0 717499 693910 273 42 0 693677 0 So in this very simple case, memory required tops out at about 3 GB for the 32Tib filesystem, or 0.4 bytes per block. Nick [1] The numbers are numbers of pages. The format is described in Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt: Table 1-2: Contents of the statm files (as of 2.6.8-rc3) .............................................................................. Field Content size total program size (pages) (same as VmSize in status) resident size of memory portions (pages) (same as VmRSS in status) shared number of pages that are shared (i.e. backed by a file) trs number of pages that are 'code' (not including libs; broken, includes data segment) lrs number of pages of library (always 0 on 2.6) drs number of pages of data/stack (including libs; broken, includes library text) dt number of dirty pages (always 0 on 2.6) .............................................................................. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html