Ext3: Faster deletion for big files?

[Theodore Tso]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 12:56:00PM +0200, Roland Bock wrote:
> Hi,
>
> is there a way to speed up the deletion of big files on an Ext3 file  
> system?
>
> I have to delete two rather big files (200GB each) once per day.
>
> The deletion of these two files takes almost 15 minutes on a Raid6 with  
> 16 Disks. During this time the IO system of the machine is pretty much  
> occupied...

Unfortunately, no, not really.  Upgrading to ext4 will definitely help.  

If you're not willing to do change filesystems, another approach might
be to put the two files on a separate LVM volume, point symlinks at
them, and then recreate the volume each day.

      	       		    	   	- Ted