Strange problems with xfs an SLESS11 SP2

[Ben Myers]

Hey Marcus,

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 02:41:41PM +0200, Hammer, Marcus wrote:
...
> So my question is what has changed from 2.6 kernels 3.0 kernels, which can
> explain this massive increase of metadata. (I did a defrag and we had
> sometimes over 140.000 extends to one inode).
> 
> I am completely confused and do now know how to handle this. Perhaps somebody
> can help me to fix this problem or to understand what happens here….  I also
> talked with some netapp engineers and they said,  I should ask at xfs.org.

You should also open a case with SuSE.

> One the filesystem are about 727 CISAM Files (IDX -> Index Files and DAT –>
> DATA Files). There are ten 15 GB Files on which some small content is often
> changed by the ERP system. The rest of the files are lower than 400 MB.  We
> encounter this problem since the upgrade to SLES11 SP2 and the new kernel
> 3.0. (By the way we had to disable the transparent hugepages support in
> kernel 3.0, because of kernel crashes ;) - but this is a different story… )

So when you upgraded you left the filesystems in place.  This is not a
dump/restore situation, and the increased fragmentation that you're seeing has
happened with subsequent runs of your application, correct?

-Ben