VERY frustrated with FreeBSD/UFS stability - please help or comment...

[Gore Jarold]

(I love FreeBSD.  This is not a troll.  If all you
have to contribute is "stop spreading FUD" or "write
some code yourself" please accept my apologies.)


I have been extremely dissatisfied with the stability
of the FreeBSD UFS/UFS2 implementation throughout all
of 5.x and 6.x.  I can take any random release from
this period and halt/lock/crash it with basic and
uninteresting filesystem operations.  In early 5.x it
was simply big inode movements from disk to disk. 
Later it was multiple snapshots.  In 6.x any number of
seemingly benign operations (filling a disk, using
quotas, dense (lots of inodes) deletes and copies) and
each time some or all of these problems are solved in
one release, slightly different versions of the same
problem show up in the next one.  For instance,
snapshot stability got a lot better from 6.0 to 6.2,
but now 6.2 has problems just moving and deleting lots
of inodes.

I am running _nothing interesting_. I don't even run
snapshots anymore ... and as you can see from other
posts, I am crashing/halting/etc. all over the place. 
This is on systems that do nothing but TCP (scp, ftp)
file service and some big (rm, cp) movements of inodes
once in a while.  In other words, my setup is as
vanilla as it gets.

It's not the hardware (happens on 3ware, adaptec,
etc.) (different systems).

It's not my esoteric config (I take generic kernel and
just delete the devices I don't use) ... also I have
no custom sysctls/loader.conf

So I am at my wits end.  Since early 2004 there has
not been a single release version of FreeBSD (well,
except _perhaps_ 6.1-RELEASE ...) that I don't
regularly knock over with _simple, generic movements
of files_.

So my plea for help is as follows:

a) am I really the only person in the world that moves
around millions of inodes throughout the day ?  Am I
the only person in the world that has ever filled up a
snapshotted FS (or a quota'd FS, for that matter) ? 
Am I the only person in the world that does a mass
deletion of several hundred thousand inodes several
times per day ?

OR:

b) am I just stupid ?  Is everyone doing this, and
there is 3 pages of sysctls and kernel tunes that
everyone does to their system when they are going to
use it this way ?  Am I just naive for taking a
release and paring down GENERIC and attempting to run
as-is out of the box without major tuning ?

If so, can I see those tunes/sysctls ?

I am _really_ hoping that it is (b) ... I would much
rather look back on all of this frustration as my own
fault than have the burden of proving all of this (as
I will no doubt be called upon to do). (1)

Thanks.  Please add your comments...


(1) just load up 6.2 and cp/rm a few million inodes
around.  Or turn on quotas and fill your filesystem
up.  Kaboom.


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