[rescue] Filesystem choice for fileserver?

[Peter Corlett]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 10:46:01AM +0900, kevin r. marhsall wrote:
[...]
> I have recently done some work on a RHEL box using ext3 and have had some
> significant issues with large files taking forever to delete. This has
> come up with one single 80Gb file and in situations when deleting large
> directory trees. Unfortunately, this is all anecdotal as i have not done
> much to try and determine if the source of the slowdown.

Yes, unlink *is* expensive on ext3. That's because the file's inode and
indirect blocks all have to be walked to determine which blocks to mark in
the free space map. I suspect that unlink also locks the filesystem until
the operation is complete.

Still, it's not as if you're regularly deleting 80GB files...