Good morning,
I'm seeing an issue on a few servers that they are going 'dirty' a lot, around once a month.
For example: This was on 11/8:
# tune2fs -l /dev/sda7 | grep state
Filesystem state: clean with errors
We ran a fsck on home, and it cleaned up fine:
12552126 inodes used (11.38%)
628394 non-contiguous inodes (1.6%)
# of inodes with ind/dind/tind blocks: 589193/11935/1
109892528 blocks used (49.83%)
0 bad blocks
4 large files
11673859 regular files
867367 directories
0 character device files
0 block device files
0 fifos
1242 links
10891 symbolic links (10883 fast symbolic links)
0 sockets
--------
12553359 files
However, now it's dirty again!:
# tune2fs -l /dev/sda7 | grep state
Filesystem state: clean with errors
# grep EXT3 /var/log/messages
Dec 16 20:22:44 server kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sda7): ext3_lookup: deleted inode referenced: 105628446
Dec 16 20:22:44 server kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sda7): ext3_lookup: deleted inode referenced: 105628446
I'm honestly not sure where to go from here. Any suggestions / pointers are greatly appreciated.
Happy holidays!
Have you also looked for i/o errors in /var/log/messages, /var/log/syslog, and /var/log/dmesg?
How busy are these filesystems? If you get a lot of reads & writes and file creation/deletion (particularly below the filesystem's block size) you can get this sort of behaviour.