I found a server last week that was having severe issues with disk I/O to the point where most operations were taking many minutes to complete. The server wasn’t under much load, but a quick run of dmesg threw quite a bit of these lines out onto the screen:
EXT3-fs warning (device sda5): ext3_dx_add_entry: [...]
Just in case some of you out there enjoy nomenclature and theory behind Linux filesystems, here’s some things to keep in mind. The modification time (mtime) of a file describes when the actual data blocks that hold the file changed. The changed time (ctime) of a file describes when the metadata was last [...]
If your system abruptly loses power, or if a RAID card is beginning to fail, you might see an ominous message like this within your logs:
EXT3-fs error (device hda3) in start_transaction: Journal has aborted
Basically, the system is telling you that it’s detected a filesystem/journal mismatch, and it can’t utilize the journal any longer. When [...]