Author: Paul Schutte Date: To: Theo E. Schlossnagle CC: exim-users, linux-xfs Subject: [Exim] Re: Exim and XFS filesystem
What mount options did you use ?
Paul
"Theo E. Schlossnagle" wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> We have been running exim for a while and we run it on over 75 machines
> (Linux, BSDs Solaris). We recently started using SGI's xfs filesystem for
> most of our operations because of its speed and stability -- we are _very_
> happy with it. I have never had any problems with it ... until now.
>
> Exim v3.14,v3.22,v3.33 and Linux 2.4.2-xfs. The xfs parition in question is
> running atop a RAID-1 md device on two 9GB scsi drives.
>
> After running Exim with its spool directory on an xfs partition and under low
> load (100 messages/minute) I would soon get an Exim process spinning CPU bound
> and I could not kill it [kill -9 did nothing]. The system was stuck on disk
> writes (so any process that calls fsync or friends would get stuck in the run
> queue never to come out again.) No modified files were writted to disk (by
> any process) after this point. A reboot was required and restore "normal"
> operation.
>
> We tried many things to fix this with no success, but as soon as we configured
> exim to use a non xfs (ext2 in this case) mounted spool directory, the problem
> instantly disappeared.
>
> It looked as if the kernel had a thread stuck writing to or reading from the
> filesystem journal. If anyone knows a solution to this problem, I am all
> ears. Otherwise, steer clear of running you Exim spools on xfs.
>
> --
> Theo Schlossnagle
> 1024D/82844984/95FD 30F1 489E 4613 F22E 491A 7E88 364C 8284 4984
> 2047R/33131B65/71 F7 95 64 49 76 5D BA 3D 90 B9 9F BE 27 24 E7
