[Fedora] Re: Alternatives to du

[alan]

On Tue, 10 Apr 2007, Mark Haney wrote:

> Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:
>> alan wrote:
>>> That sounds like an indicator of a bigger problem.  On an unraided 330GB 
>>> drive, du takes a fraction of that to complete. (I would have to run a 
>>> test to get actual times.)  Sounds like there is something else going on.
>>    That would depend on the amount of physical files on the drive.  You can 
>> have 100 massive files and du will run nice and fast, or you can have 
>> 1,000,000 tiny files and folders and du will take its dear sweet time to 
>> run.
>> 
>
> this is exactly my problem I believe.  I have a 4TB RAID SAN and the problem 
> directory holds well over a million small files.  Even a directory under that 
> directory, du takes almost 40 minutes to total up 74GB.

It also depends on the directory structure.  If all those files are in a 
small number of directories, it will take a very long time.  And not just 
du.  Anything that stats those files is going to take a lot of time.  It 
is not a problem with du, it is a problem with the filesystem not handling 
large quantites on files in a single directory.  (A lesson learned using 
xmh and being subscribed to the kernel list.)

-- 
"Invoking the supernatural can explain anything, and hence explains nothing."
                   - University of Utah bioengineering professor Gregory Clark