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Re: Resizing LVM issue



Richard Hector wrote:
> I prefer not to get in the situation where I have to shrink a filesystem
> though - xfs doesn't support it anyway.

Agreed.  Even better is to avoid it.  Small ext{3,4} file systems
shrink acceptably well.  But larger ext{3,4} file systems can take a
very long time to shrink.  I once made the mistake of trying to shrink
a 600G filesystem.  The operation was eventually successful.  But it
took 10 days to complete!  And once I started it there was no other
option than to let it complete.

There are many stories of this from people doing the same thing on the
net.  It seems that the code for expanding the file system is used
often and optimized to run fast but that the code for shrinking it is
not used very often and therefore has severe inefficiencies.  But if
you wait long enough, more than a week in my case, then it will finish
successfully.

If I ever need to shrink an ext{3,4} file system again I will not
shrink it.  I will instead create a new file system of the desired
size and then copy from the old to the new.  That is reliable and will
complete in much less time than shrinking an existing file system.

Bob

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