Date: Thu, 14 Aug 1997 22:32:14 -0700 From: David Greenman <dg@root.com> To: Thomas David Rivers <ponds!rivers@dg-rtp.dg.com> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: More info on slow "rm" times with 2.2.1+. Message-ID: <199708150532.WAA12760@implode.root.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 14 Aug 1997 23:23:07 EDT." <199708150323.XAA08397@lakes.dignus.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> However - things are not going any faster... > > I have determined that it's not the argument processing; I can >simply pick a single file to remove; issue: > > rm file > >and it takes upwards of 3 to 5 seconds and a *slew* of disk >activity to accomplish the task... (recall, this is a miserable >little IDE drive as well.. the 'rm' spends a lot of its time >in biowait.) The answer to this is that FreeBSD, like many (most?) other operating systems, doesn't handle very large directories very well. When I was looking into similar slowness on a different news server, I found that the control.cancel newsgroup directory was more than 10MB large! I think it contained more than 200,000 files, but I don't recall the exact number. Anyway, my solution was to add this to news' cron: 0 * * * * rm -rf /var/news/control/cancel > /dev/null 2>&1 ; rm -f /var/news/over.view/control/cancel/.overview I tried hard to prevent INN from creating files there in the first place, but was unsuccessful. FWIW, I also disabled cancel processing on this machine because cancel spam was trying to delete everything. -DG David Greenman Core-team/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199708150532.WAA12760>