Re: problems with large directories - not only ext2

Marc Lehmann (pcg@goof.com)
Tue, 10 Aug 1999 00:23:22 +0200

On Mon, Aug 09, 1999 at 11:28:03PM +0200, Hermann Schichl <herman@esi.ac.at> wrote:
> >
> This is not a situation of Linux (IMHO) but one of UNIX. Most Unices
> show this behaviour. Probably if you try ls -fR, times should go linearly
> with directory size.

As I said, this has nothing to do with ext2 being slow with large directories
(or any fs being slow).

I would _not_ mind "find" being slow, esp. since this is going to be fixed
in 2.3.

I _do_ mind my whole system getting slow just because some background
process runs find. And yes, the whole system gets slow and _very_
sluggishly.

This happens only while scanning large directories. My "theory du jour"
is that the dcache operations are single-cpu and - in this case - very time
consuming.

That (or something similar, as my theory is most probably wrong) would
explain why my dual cpu system gets so sluggishly while just doing "find",
which should be very i/o intensive but nothing else.

-- 
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