unexpected soft update inconsistency

[Roman Neuhauser]

Hi there,

I am seeking an explanation of the following fsck(8) behavior.

This box is originally (IIRC) a 4.5-RELEASE install, gradually cvsupped
to a relatively recent 4.8-STABLE:

roman at freepuppy ~ 1007:0 > uname -a
FreeBSD freepuppy.bellavista.cz 4.8-STABLE FreeBSD 4.8-STABLE #2: Thu Jun  5 12:57:47 CEST 2003 root at freepuppy.bellavista.cz:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/FREEPUPPY2_5  i386

The system was dump/restored to a new disk last summer.

Some time ago I switched from mbox files to maildirs as my mail store
because maildrop(1) was EX_TEMPFAILing on the larger mboxes. Maildirs
have fixed this problem, but entering e. g. my postfix-users@ maildir
(162MB, ~34500 messages) takes way too much time:

roman at freepuppy ~ 1002:0 > time mutt -nF .mail/mutt/muttrc -e 'exec quit' -f ~/Mail/lists/postfix
34458 kept, 0 deleted.
mutt -nF .mail/mutt/muttrc -e 'exec quit' -f ~/Mail/lists/postfix  4.94s user 3.89s system 10% cpu 1:21.75 total
roman at freepuppy ~ 1003:0 > find ~/Mail/lists/postfix -type f|wc -l
   34458
roman at freepuppy ~ 1004:0 > du -hs ~/Mail/lists/postfix
162M    /home/roman/Mail/lists/postfix

(mutt-1.5.1i with patch-1.5.1.cd.edit_threads.9.2)

Yesterday I thought: hmm, maybe there's something wrong with the
filesystem, went to singleuser with `shutdown now`, ran fsck(8), and got
some "unexpected soft update inconsistency" messages in my ~/Mail.

The filesystem is always ok during the normal boot-time fsck run, so I'm
wondering whether this is normal, or if the fs is screwed. Attached is
the output of fsck(8) run in multiuser (postfix was running).

roman at freepuppy ~ 1005:0 > df -h
Filesystem    Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1a   504M    49M   415M    10%    /
/dev/ad0s1e    72G    36G    30G    55%    /usr
procfs        4.0K   4.0K     0B   100%    /proc
roman at freepuppy ~ 1006:0 > ls -l /var
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  8 Sep 16  2002 /var -> /usr/var

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