Re: xfs: very slow after mount, very slow at umount

Mark Lord
2011-01-27T03:50:54Z

On 11-01-26 10:43 PM, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 08:43:43PM -0500, Mark Lord wrote:
>> On 11-01-26 08:22 PM, Mark Lord wrote:
..
>> Thinking about it some more: the first problem very much appears as if
>> it is due to a filesystem check happening on the already-mounted filesystem,
>> if that makes any kind of sense (?).
>
> Not to me. You can check this simply by looking at the output of
> top while the problem is occurring...

Top doesn't show anything interesting, since disk I/O uses practically zero CPU.

>> running xfs_check on the umounted drive takes about the same 30-60 seconds,
>> with the disk activity light fully "on".
>
> Well, yeah - XFS check reads all the metadata in the filesystem, so
> of course it's going to thrash your disk when it is run. The fact it
> takes the same length of time as whatever problem you are having is
> likely to be coincidental.

I find it interesting that the mount takes zero-time,
as if it never actually reads much from the filesystem.
Something has to eventually read the metadata etc.

>> The other thought that came to mind: this behaviour has only been
>> noticed recently, probably because I have recently added about
>> 1000 new files (hundreds of MB each) to the videos/ directory on
>> that filesystem. Whereas before, it had fewer than 500 (multi-GB)
>> files in total.
>>
>> So if it really is doing some kind of internal filesystem check,
>> then the time required has only recently become 3X larger than
>> before.. so the behaviour may not be new/recent, but now is very
>> noticeable.
>
> Where does that 3x figure come from?

Well, it used to have about 500 files/subdirs on it,
and now it has somewhat over 1500 files/subdirs.
That's a ballpark estimate of 3X the amount of meta data.

All of these files are at least large (hundreds of MB),
and a lot are huge (many GB) in size.

Cheers