more on _very_ slow e2fsck

From: Robert M. Riches Jr. (spamtrap42_at_verizon.net)
Date: 02/01/04 

Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2004 00:50:44 GMT

A week or two ago, I had posted about e2fsck taking
massively too long after doing a "shutdown -rF now". With
all previous Linux systems, including RHL 8.0 on the same
machine with the same partition structure, it only took
about 5 minutes. With RHL 9, I timed it earlier today at 50
minutes (!), just a little less than an hour, just to check
the filesystems. (It was 3:17pm to 4:07pm.)

The funny thing is a similar machine with a much simpler
partitioning scheme (and a little smaller disks) only takes
3 minutes, even with RHL 9.

The key would appear to be #101490 at bugzilla.redhat.com.
Unfortunately, the experimental package that's supposed to
fix this, e2fsprogs-1.34-1 is not (yet) available in
rawhide.

At least the conversion from ext2 to ext3 went well (almost
trivially easy), so now if the system crashes or the UPS
fails during a power outage, I can defer full checking until
a more convenient time.

Thanks.

Robert Riches
spamtrap42@verizon.net
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)