Re: fsck.ext3 -yv /dev/sda1 on 1 terabyte partition
> * From: "Douglas A. Tutty" <dtutty@porchlight.ca>
>Does anyone know how much memory fsck needs to check a large filesystem?
some (rather old) information is contained in
Linkname: E2fsprogs Release Notes
URL: http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/e2fsprogs-release.html
for example, it says
E2fsprogs 1.07 (March 14, 1997)
E2fsck is now uses much less memory when checking really large
filesystems (or rather, filesystems with a large number of inodes).
Previously a filesystem with 1 million inodes required 4 megabytes of
memory to store inode count statistics; that storage requirement
has now been reduced to roughly half a megabyte.
E2fsprogs 1.15 (July 18, 1999)
E2fsck now uses mallinfo if it exists to get accurate statistics about
its memory usage.
Moreover:
Linkname: Filesystems (ext3, reiser, xfs, jfs) comparison on Debian Etch
URL: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/388
Times of over two months to 'fsck' a filesystem have been reported for
'ext3' and XFS sometimes requires more than 4GB of memory to run 'fsck'
(it is possible to create and use an XFS filesystem on a system with
a 32 bit that can only be 'fsck'ed on a 64 bit CPU, and at least one
case has actually happened). The basic problem is that while very
large filesystems using JFS or XFS (or very recent 'ext3') perform
well on RAID storage, because they take advantage of the parallel nature
of the underlying storage system, 'fsck' is single threaded in every
Linux file system design that I have seen. Bad news. More details here:
http://www.sabi.co.uk/Notes/anno05-4th.html#051012
http://www.sabi.co.uk/Notes/anno05-4th.html#051009
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