Kevin, thanks for the explanation. This coincides perfectly which what I am seeing.
Next question is, is there a way to clean up the TOC? Regards Corey On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 7:47 PM, Collins, Kevin [BEELINE] < [email protected]> wrote: > A directory is special kind of file that contains the “table of contents” > of what is in it. When you add a new file, its added to the TOC. When you > remove a file, the slot that information occupied in the TOC is emptied but > the slot itself is still there. Removing all of the files empties all the > slots, so in essence you have a very large (but empty) TOC. > > > > So, actions that read the directory (via readdir() call) still have to > process through all the empty slots. This is not unique to ext2... > > > > Thanks, > > > > Kevin > > > > *From:* [email protected] [mailto: > [email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Corey Kovacs > *Sent:* Tuesday, November 03, 2009 11:42 AM > *To:* Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (Tikanga) discussion mailing-list > *Subject:* [rhelv5-list] ext2 performance... > > > > I have a directory that grows to 150k files and higher over time on an ext2 > filesystem. Over time, due to the sheer number of files, it of course takes > longer and longer to do things like simple finds, ls etc. as expected. > > What's not expected is that even after clearing the directory out, the > performance is degraded. Only deleting and recreating the dir fixes the > problem completely, until it fills up again. It was described to me as > something to do with a "high water mark" that is kept on the dir. > > For instance, if I create a dir say,,,, > > drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2009-11-03 20:27 temp > > and fill it with several thousand files.... > > for i in `seq 1 1 100000`; do touch temp/file$i; done > > drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1896448 2009-11-03 20:30 temp > > The size of the dir reflects the increase, which is expected, but now if I > do... > > rm -f temp/* > > drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1896448 2009-11-03 20:31 temp > > The dir is empty but the size remains at 1896448. > > This seems to have an impact on the overall performance of doing finds and > ls commands in those dir and it gets worse as time goes on. > > Can someone please shed some light on this? > > This is on a RHEL4 update 4 machine. > > Thanks > > Corey > > _______________________________________________ > rhelv5-list mailing list > [email protected] > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list > >
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