Hello dear ext4 developers, I'd like to ask about following problem I hit yesterday (and which I'm a bit responsible for, I guess). we were dealing with slow access to directories with lots of files (large maildirs), so after some tests, I came to conclusion that optimizing directories using e2fsck -D (on unmounted FS of course) helps a lot. So after testing this on our test box, I did it on production mailserver mail volume. Then I decided to do some tests on newer kernel, so I rebooted test box and got lots of fs errors.. I checked production box, and it got bad as well: lots of dx_probe:829: inode #15949784: block 35579: comm deliver: Directory hole found messages.. so I unmounted fs again, run fsck, and got zillion of: Inode 18378187 ref count is 2, should be 1. Fix? yes Unattached inode 18378194 Connect to /lost+found? yes messages.. after ~3 hours, I gave up, and recovered FS from backup.. checking fs after "repair" showed that some of large mailboxes vanished completely (and appeared in lost+found) I think I can rule out hardware problem, since it appeared on two completely different systems after same action.. but I'll try to prepare new test environment and reproduce it. What I think might be my big mistake is that I was using quite old e2fsprogs - 1.42.6, kernel was 4.4.52 (which I know is also a bit old, we're already testig 4.14.x) My question is, was that some known e2fsck problem which got fixed in new version? Or did I do something wrong? I'm going to retry using 1.43.8, but still I'd be a bit calmer to know it was known problem and got fixed :) If I could provide some more information, please let me know.. BR nik PS: both systems were running latest centos 6 (but with newer kernel and e2fsprogs) -- ------------------------------------- Ing. Nikola CIPRICH LinuxBox.cz, s.r.o. 28.rijna 168, 709 00 Ostrava tel.: +420 591 166 214 fax: +420 596 621 273 mobil: +420 777 093 799 www.linuxbox.cz mobil servis: +420 737 238 656 email servis: servis@xxxxxxxxxxx -------------------------------------
