Snapshot usage guidelines (to avoid stability issues)
Espen Skoglund
esk at ira.uka.de
Wed Jun 20 16:39:44 UTC 2007
Hi,
A couple of days ago I decided to start using snapshots on my system.
Knowing that the functionality has been available for quite some time
now I (apparently wrongly) assumed that it was ready for production
use. My bad.
My system, a 6-STABLE from week and a half ago, uses two 250GB
gstriped disks and has about 4-5 snapshots on one 215GB UFS partiton.
This morning I learned that things had gone terribly wrong during some
nightly cronjobs, hanging the whole system. Suspecting that snapshots
were the culprit I soon learned after some investigation that the
snapshot functionality wasn't nearly as stable as I had hoped for.
Looking at PRs and mailing lists there seems to be mainly two
outstanding stability issues with snapshots: a) snapshotted fs running
full, and b) deleting large amount of files on an fs with multiple
snapshots. The former issue, while certainly annoying, one could be
able to work around. The latter issue, on the other hand, seems more
like a definite show stopper.
Am I right in inferring that the two above cases are main issues with
snaphots at this time, or are there other known gotchas that I have to
look out for.
eSk
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