fsck way too slow

[Chuck Swiger]

Andrea Venturoli wrote:
>>> Just to clarify: running "fsck /" (read-only) in multiuser mode 
>>> takes less than a minute. fsck at boot takes approx. 50 times that 
>>> long!
>>
>> ...and yes, that difference is not reasonable.  Are you using bgfsck 
>> or not...?
>
> Hm, what do you mean?
> I'd gladly let my system fsck in background after boot, but it won't 
> do that on a root partition, as mentioned somewhere else on this thread.
> However, apart from that, I've set everything up according to this 
> wish of mine (i.e. I enabled softupdates and I did not put 
> background_fsck="NO" in my /etc/rc.conf).
Try turning off background fsck and see whether it does better, the next 
time the system comes back up after an unclean shutdown.  I think bgfsck 
has some kind of built-in throttling to avoid doing too much I/O, which 
may not be working quite right in this case, causing it to simply hang 
out mostly idle rather than finishing the filesystem check.

If you have to wait 5-minutes up front rather than sitting with the 
thing crawling for an hour, maybe that's a better tradeoff...?  Either 
way, it would be interesting to know whether automatic fsck'ing in the 
foreground procedes at a reasonable speed or not.

-- 
-Chuck