what is fsck's "slowdown"?

[Marc G. Fournier]

On Sat, 4 Sep 2004, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:

> On 2004-09-03 17:35, Chris Laverdure <dashevil at sympatico.ca> wrote:
>> On Fri, 2004-09-03 at 21:14, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>>> (Regarding "parallelization" of fsck by spawning many instances of
>>> fsck for parts of the same partition...)
>>>
>>> My intuition says that if metadata of the first part of the disk references
>>> data residing on the second part synchronization and locking would probably
>>> be a bit difficult; actually very difficult.
>>
>> My intuition tells me that it would be a much better solution to run
>> multiple fsck's concurrently. What harm could there be in fscking (num
>> of processors) partitions at the same time?
>
> AFAIK, this is exactly what "background fsck" does in 5.X :-)

fsck -p in 4.x does this also .. but, when there is only one large file 
system, and 4 or 5 smaller ones, those 4 or 5 smaller ones don't take long 
t do ... in my case, that one large one just took 12hrs to complete, on a 
system where that one fsck was the only thing running :(  I don't believe 
that moving to 5.x's bkgd fsck will speed that up any, and, in fact, would 
probably slow it down since it will be completing with other processes ...

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy at hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664