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Hi All!

I have been running a spam filtering OpenBSD box for about a year and a
half. It has worked flawlessly up until about a week ago. I'm hoping
some of the OpenBSD masters on this list can help me.

About a week ago I noticed our email was starting to queue up on this
box. To make a long story short anytime I try to write to the /var
partition it takes FOREVER. The spam server was setup to zip up any
mail it tagged as spam and save it to the /var partition. Well now
there is about 350k zip files in there. Each about 2k in size.

When I try to delete a single file from the /var partition it takes
about 30 seconds. I thought maybe it was a hardware problem so I did a
'fsck /var' and that did not come back with any errors. Also the other
partitions work perfect and they are all on the same physical disk.

Someone gave me a suggestion to add softdep to the mount option. So I
tried that but it didn't seem to have any affect.

Anyone out there have any ideas on how to fix this? I'm thinking the
partition might be corrupt. If this can't be fixed, is there a way to
backup everything on /var (minus the 350k spam files) to another
partition and then wipe/re-create /var and back it up? Any help would
be MUCH appreciated.

Thanks!

In article <NoSpam-55AB9D.10301821022005@news.isp.giganews.com>,
Levi Zander <NoSpam@ReplyToForum.com> wrote:

> Hi All!
>
> I have been running a spam filtering OpenBSD box for about a year and a
> half. It has worked flawlessly up until about a week ago. I'm hoping
> some of the OpenBSD masters on this list can help me.
>
> About a week ago I noticed our email was starting to queue up on this
> box. To make a long story short anytime I try to write to the /var
> partition it takes FOREVER. The spam server was setup to zip up any
> mail it tagged as spam and save it to the /var partition. Well now
> there is about 350k zip files in there. Each about 2k in size.
>
> When I try to delete a single file from the /var partition it takes
> about 30 seconds. I thought maybe it was a hardware problem so I did a
> 'fsck /var' and that did not come back with any errors. Also the other
> partitions work perfect and they are all on the same physical disk.
>
> Someone gave me a suggestion to add softdep to the mount option. So I
> tried that but it didn't seem to have any affect.
>
> Anyone out there have any ideas on how to fix this? I'm thinking the
> partition might be corrupt. If this can't be fixed, is there a way to
> backup everything on /var (minus the 350k spam files) to another
> partition and then wipe/re-create /var and back it up? Any help would
> be MUCH appreciated.
>
> Thanks!

I think I have fixed my problem. I backed-up the /var partition to
/usr, then formated /var and copied everything back. Seems to be
working fine as of right now.

Levi Zander <NoSpam@ReplyToForum.com> writes:

> Hi All!
>
> About a week ago I noticed our email was starting to queue up on this
> box. To make a long story short anytime I try to write to the /var
> partition it takes FOREVER. The spam server was setup to zip up any
> mail it tagged as spam and save it to the /var partition. Well now
> there is about 350k zip files in there. Each about 2k in size.

what does "df -i /var" say?

This /may/ be due to having many files in a single directory, I am
going to assume you are saving to /var/spool/junk. If you

mkdir /var/spool/junk.new
mv /var/spool/junk /var/spool/junk.old && mv /var/spool/junk.new /var/spool/junk

this will allow your junk system to use an empty directory - this may
ease the problem in the short term.


> Anyone out there have any ideas on how to fix this? I'm thinking the
> partition might be corrupt. If this can't be fixed, is there a way to
> backup everything on /var (minus the 350k spam files) to another
> partition and then wipe/re-create /var and back it up? Any help would
> be MUCH appreciated.
>
> Thanks!

while deleting a single file takes around 30 seconds, how long does
deleting 5 files take?

time touch /var/1 /var/2 /var/3 /var/4 /var/5;
time rm /var/1 /var/2 /var/3 /var/4 /var/5;

--
Justin Murdock

you didn't mention version, but before 3.6 and the dirhash code,
anything over about 10k files in a directory starts getting slow.
after 100k it really becomes unreasonable.