kern/77680: Too many files in a single directory slowing and then crashing the system

[Kris Kennaway]

The following reply was made to PR kern/77680; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org>
To: David WU <dyw at wyk69.org>
Cc: freebsd-gnats-submit at FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: kern/77680: Too many files in a single directory slowing and then crashing the system
Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 18:48:40 -0800

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 On Fri, Feb 18, 2005 at 02:53:47PM +0000, David WU wrote:
 
 > I have a mail server running mainly sendmail with amavisd-new and
 > clamav and spamassasin.  The size of the quarantine directory
 > /var/virusmails can grow fairly quickly due to the large number of
 > files created.  I suspect when the size get to be larger than 8M
 > (from the output of ls -l /var) the system will start to slow down
 > considerably and if nothing is done will crash eventually, and will
 > not be able to reboot without manually intervention, as fsck will
 > fail no matter how many times the problematic file system is
 > checked.  I had to remove manually all the files under
 > /var/virusmails and perhaps even the directory itself before fsck
 > can be used to make the file system clean enough for a reboot.
 
 Please obtain a debugging traceback as explained in the chapter on
 kernel debugging in the developers' handbook.
 
 Kris
 
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