[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc."]] [[!meta license="""[[!toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[!toggleable id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled [[GNU Free Documentation License|/fdl]]."]]"""]] [[!tag open_issue_hurd]] From: Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault@gnu.org> Subject: rm -fr slowness I have always been surprised by the slowness of a mere rm -fr. Looking a bit inside, I see that diskfs_dirremove_hard() calls diskfs_file_update (dp, 1) (as does diskfs_truncate, diskfs_direnter_hard, and diskfs_dirrewrite_hard). diskfs_file_update then calls pager_sync on the pager, which thus writes back the whole ext2fs pager! This sounds a bit excessive to me, an unlink could just record it in memory and actually sync later. Also, the wait flag is set, so we really waits for all I/Os, which basically means strictly serializing file removals: remove one file, wait for the disk to have done it (~10ms), remove the next one, etc. I guess this is for safety reasons against crashes, but isn't the sync option there for such kind of # IRC, freenode, #hurd, 2011-07-23 <antrik> youpi: hm... async deletion does have one downside: I just removed something to make space, and retried the other command immediately afterwards, and it still said "no space left on device"... a few seconds later (after the next regular sync I suppose?) it worked <youpi> well, that's sorta expected, yes <youpi> we get the same on Linux <youpi> Mmm, on second thought, I'm not sure how that can happen <youpi> the asynchronous thing is for disk writes, not cache writes