(please reply on-list, so everybody can comment/help) Matt, thanks for the details, but apart from mount-option tuning and dir_index (which you've already enabled), I dunno why ls(1) would take *hours* to stat ~1M files... out of curiosity: are you able to try a newer kernel? does it change anything? Christian. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- The dir_index was enabled during the filesystem creation. The directories can have from 0 - 1,000,000 files at any given time The slowness is on an open of the directory when it is empty, The size of the directory refers to the directory file itself not the size of the directories contents. There are no open files in the directory when it is being stated. I will add that when we do have 50,000 files or more in the directories a listing is also very slow, can take hours. Slowness can be 5-10 minutes on a directory open open("/ems/bigdisk/132", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY) 3 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=79298560, ...}) = 0 fcntl64(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 getdents64(3, /* 3 entries */, 4096) = 72 getdents64(3, /* 0 entries */, 4096) = 0 close(3) = 0 Kernel is 2.6.9-34.0.2.ELsmp I have tried noatime which does speed up reads when there are lots of files but does not fix the directory issue These directories are empty except for two file: drwxr-xr-x 3 vbox132 root 76M Oct 2 10:04 132 drwxr-xr-x 3 vbox151 root 226M Oct 4 17:00 151 drwxr-xr-x 3 vbox229 root 33M Oct 2 10:16 229 drwxr-xr-x 3 vbox235 root 7.5M Oct 2 10:14 235 drwxr-xr-x 3 vbox246 root 52M Sep 30 20:59 246 drwxr-xr-x 3 vbox249 root 1.1M Oct 2 10:04 249 -- BOFH excuse #83: Support staff hung over, send aspirin and come back LATER. _______________________________________________ Ext3-users mailing list Ext3-users at redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users