repquota loads the server - how to treat

I want to share a solution to the problem I repquotaencountered today. I hope it helps someone not to waste time on the proceedings.

Worth FreeBSD 6.2. Regularly using repquotastatistics is collected on the use of space by users.

Symptoms of the problem: at startup, repquotaor the quotacheckprocess starts to load the CPU, and most importantly - fails to drive on disk operations. The server practically lays down.

Symptoms are relieved by killing the process repquotaor quotacheck.

But it turned out that the /home/quota.user file reached unimaginable sizes: 64G. I noticed by chance - according to the backup logs.

The problem was completely cured by the following banal: UPD

rm /home/quota.user
rm /home/quota.group
quotaoff /usr/home
quotacheck /usr/home
quotaon /usr/home


Root of evil

The bottom line was in the quota.user file format. Information about the quota is stored in the file at the offset uid * 32. Accordingly, with a large uid (or negative), the file is too large, and repquota spends a lot of time viewing the file to get to the last uid.

More on opennet and the freebsd mailing list .

There was no user with a huge uid, but there was a file with uid 2147483647. It was created by Exim due to the fact that there was a user in the system with a login consisting of 11 digits. When assigning rights to the user's mail, Exim began to think that it was a uid, not a name.

In general, somehow.