# fsck?



## Deleted member 2077 (Nov 11, 2010)

My server keeps crashing.  I think it's due to heat or hardware.  Anyways, it takes 45 minutes to do a full fsck check.  (all are UFS).  If I turn off soft updates, will it not have to check them after a crash?  How to turn off soft updates?  It's a very low load server, so performance ain't no issue.


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## rusty (Nov 11, 2010)

tunefs is what you're looking for.

`% man tunefs`


```
-n enable | disable
       Turn on/off soft updates.
```


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## SirDice (Nov 11, 2010)

You don't want to turn off softupdates. Fix the cause (crashing system) not the effect (corrupt filesystems).




> Softupdates drastically improves meta-data performance, mainly file creation and deletion.  We recommend enabling softupdates on most file systems; however, there are two limitations to softupdates that you should be aware of when determining whether to use it on a file system.  First, *softupdates guarantees file system consistency in the case of a crash* but could very easily be several seconds (even a minute!) behind on pending write to the physical disk.  If you crash you may lose more work than otherwise.  Secondly, softupdates delays the freeing of file system blocks.  If you have a file system (such as the root file system) which is close to full, doing a major update of it, e.g. ``make installworld'', can run it out of space and cause the update to fail.  For this reason, softupdates will not be enabled on the root file system during a typical install.  There is no loss of performance since the root file system is rarely written to.


Taken from tuning(7).


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## richardpl (Nov 11, 2010)

Disabling soft-updates will not make fsck faster.
But disabling soft-updates and enabling gjournal will mark fsck obsolete.


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## aragon (Nov 11, 2010)

richardpl said:
			
		

> Disabling soft-updates will not make fsck faster.


It'll also make fsck mandatory.  With softupdates enabled you can disable boot time bgfsck so that you can do it manually during a low disk usage period.  Add to /etc/rc.conf:


```
background_fsck="NO"
```



			
				richardpl said:
			
		

> But disabling soft-updates and enabling gjournal will mark fsck obsolete.


That's another option too, but unfortunately it's slow.


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