I have a Suse 9.x box, with a 80GB IDE HDD and the following partion info for
Linux (all are ext3)

/dev/hda5 4.0G 2.1G 1.7G 55% /
/dev/hda3 1012M 45M 916M 5% /boot
/dev/hda12 9.9G 5.6G 3.9G 60% /dumps
/dev/hda10 9.9G 3.2G 6.3G 34% /home
/dev/hda11 9.9G 6.9G 2.5G 74% /home1
/dev/hda15 5.4G 33M 5.1G 1% /local
/dev/hda8 2.0G 365M 1.6G 19% /tmp
/dev/hda6 8.9G 4.4G 4.1G 53% /usr
/dev/hda7 3.0G 148M 2.7G 6% /usr/local
/dev/hda9 2.0G 841M 1.1G 44% /var

Overall there are 15 partitions including partition type 0x0b and
0x4f with other OSes installed on them (not listed in the above table).

During boot into Suse (kernel 2.6.8.x) every 60 days all ext3 partitions undergo a consistency check, most likely using fsck.
However, of late the time taken for this consistency check is going on
increasing. Initially with nearly the same amount of data in all the
partitions it used to take 5-10 minutes, however this time it took more than
*10 hours* .

Please suggest any pointers towards the probable reason and any solutions.

Thanks in advance,
Hemant