Re: Rm performance issue

[Philip Rowlands]

On Wed, 26 Sep 2007, Ken Naim wrote:

> I am removing 300gb of data spread across 130 files within a single
> directory and the process take just over 2 hours. In my past experiences
> removing a small number of large files was very quick, almost instantaneous.
> I am running red hat Linux on ibm p series hardware against a san with sata
> and fiber drives. I see this issue on both the sata and fiber side although
> the rm process is slightly faster on fiber.

It's more likely to be caused by your storage system than rm, but here's 
how to tell:

mkdir foo
touch foo/{a,b,c,d,e,f}
strace -T -e trace=file rm -rf foo

Try this in a temporary directory on your local disk, to get some idea 
of how long the unlink(2) system call takes. Then try the strace on your 
slow-running rm command, and see how long rm is spending waiting for the 
system call to complete.


Cheers,
Phil