unlink performance

Ryan Dooley rd at powerset.com
Tue Aug 14 18:08:28 UTC 2007


Greetings,

I'm looking for clues about speeding up unlink performance.  I have an ext3 file system (well, across several machines) that have a temp directory.  The application needs to clean up the temp directory before the next run of the application begins and the engineers want to clean out this temp directory  "quickly".

I have no hard numbers yet on what they are seeing but the contents of the directory involves "many files" and "many directories" of various sizes.

The file system in question is mounted with noatime,nodiratime with the following filesystem features:

 has_journal, resize_inode, dir_index, filetype, needs_recovery, sparse_super and large_file

The operating system is Fedora Core 6 with fedora's 2.6.20-1.2933 kernel.  The mounted file system is about 1.2TB in size and is a software raid-5 over four, 7200 rpm SATA disks.  The disks were formatted with all the defaults.

Pre-loading the file system cache (a la "find /path/to/temp -type f -print >/dev/null") followed by an "rm -rf /path/to/temp" seems to be pretty speedy to me.

Any other suggestions of things I can experiment with to build performance numbers?

Cheers,
Ryan




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