ext3 filesystem performance issues

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 12:40:15 -0400,
  "Miner, Jonathan W (CSC) (US SSA)" <jonathan.w.miner at baesystems.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> > For instance, will any of the utilities fail (ls, mv, chown etc) if you
> > have more than x files in a directory?
> 
> "ls" can be a good indication of the worse-case performance.  It has to read all the entries, sort the list, and then display to the user. The more entries there are the more resources needed to sort the list.

The -f option disables sorts according to the man page. Though it is still
slow even using that option with large directories.