[PVE-User] ext3 journal issues in VM

[Tim Nelson]

Greetings-

I'm running a VM (qm, not vz) with Zimbra mail server. It works very well, no problems. However, I've found a very curious issue that crops up on occasion...

When emptying a large folder within Zimbra, say with 9k messages (had it happen with as little as 4k), the system gets very slow and stops responding. A check of the console shows the ext3 filesystem has had a journal abort, and gone read-only.

The physical hardware of the system is in perfect working order, with no problems handling the I/O load. Is it possible this use case (large amounts of very small files) is not handled correctly by the virtualization storage layer? At this time I'm using the 'RAW' file format, presented as an IDE disk to the VM.

Thoughts? Thanks!

--Tim