[Gluster-users] Targeted fix-layout?

[Dan Bretherton]

Dear All-
I am running a fix-layout operation on a volume after seeing errors 
mentioning "anomalies" and "holes" in the logs.  There is a particular 
directory that is giving trouble and I would like to be able to run the 
layout fix on that first.  Users are experiencing various I/O errors 
including "invalid argument" and "Unknown error 526", but after running 
for a week the volume wide fix-layout doesn't seem to have reached this 
particular directory yet. Fix-layout takes a long time because there are 
millions of files in the volume and the CPU load is consistently very 
high on all the servers while it is running, sometimes over 20.  
Therefore I really need to find a way to target particular directories 
or speed up the volume wide fix-layout.

I have no idea what caused these errors but it could be related to the 
previous fix-layout operation, which I started following the addition of 
a new pair of bricks, not having completed successfully.  The problem is 
that the rebalance operation on one or more servers often fails before 
completing and there is no way (that I know of) to restart or resume the 
process on one server.  Every time this happens I stop the fix-layout 
and start it again, but it has never completed successfully on every 
server despite sometimes running for several weeks.

One other possible cause I can think of is my recent policy of using XFS 
for new bricks instead of ext4.  The reason I think this might be 
causing the problem is that none of the other volumes have any XFS 
bricks yet and they aren't experiencing any I/O errors.  Are there any 
special mount options required for XFS, and is there any reason why a 
volume shouldn't contain a mixture of ext4 and XFS bricks?

Regards,
Dan.