martin f krafft írta:
Don't even think about using XFS, if you plan to use even a moderately loaded MySQL instance on top of it. It locked up one of our serversI wouldn't want this to become a flamefest, but thankfully, I would
Neither do I. :) I just wanted to share my experience.
several times to the point where only the service processor's watchdog function helped, and resetted the machine. There were no signs, no logs, it simply blocked all disc I/O. The system is a Debian Sarge with a custom 2.4.31 kernel, but according to the info I found via Google, the problem is still in the 2.6 series.I hope you have reason to believe that it's XFS at fault, not MySQL. Sure, XFS is not bug-free, but neither is MySQL. If the problem doesn't appear when the instance is on another FS, I suppose there's an argument. However, as computers go, you're probably going to be unable to reproduce the situation with another filesystem, so it's going to be impossible to say it was XFS' fault.
It surely was the fault of XFS, reformatting the partition solved it.It was _very_ hard to find info about it with Google, but at last I could. The other guy who had the same problem operated a dual Xeon Dell server with a 2.6 kernel, and XFS freezed his machine as well. Ours is a dual P3S with 3,5 GB RAM and an Intel SRCU42X SCSI RAID controller (=LSI MegaRAID 320-2X), and we use a hand-compiled 2.4.31 kernel currently, as I mentioned it in my previous post. First I thought it was the fault of the megaraid2 driver, but putting the logs on a separate IDE disc didn't turn up any info, either. Disc operations were all blocked (the machine responded to ping), and I didn't have access to the console since it resides in a datacentre.
After finding his complaint in a mailing list archive, I took a dump from MySQL, shut down all public services, reformatted the partition with Ext3 and restored the database. The machine is still happily chugging along since then, currently it has 164 days of uptime. :) And it received much higher loads in the Christmas season, because it operates Hungary's oldest and probably biggest online DVD store.
Anyway, I'd be interested (off-list if you deem it inappropriate for this thread) to learn about the problem you found that allegedly still exists in the 2.6 series.
Unfortunately I don't remember the URL I found about it. :( Regards, Gabor