Re: ext3/ext4 directories don't shrink after deleting lots of files

[Timo Sirainen]

On May 14, 2009, at 8:32 PM, Josef Bacik wrote:

> On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 6:02 PM, Timo Sirainen <tss@xxxxxx> wrote:
> > I've noticed that if you create e.g. 100k files to a directory and  
> > then
> > delete the files, the directory entry still seems to take a couple of
> > megabytes. Later whenever accessing the (almost empty) directory it  
> > can
> > take a few seconds to load it into cache.
> >
> > Is there a way to shrink the directory somehow without having to  
> > rmdir()
> > it? Would be nice if kernel did it automatically, but I could live  
> > with
> > a manual userspace syscall/tool as well.
>
> fsck -D <device>, when its unmounted of course.

I was rather thinking something that I could run while the system was  
fully operational. Otherwise just moving the files to a temp directory  
+ rmdir() + rename() would have been fine too.

I just tested that xfs, jfs and reiserfs all shrink the directories  
immediately. Is it more difficult to implement for ext* or has no one  
else found this to be a problem?

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