10minutes for rm -rf on 400MB

[Dirk Wetter <dirkw@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

we've been running XFS on the data disks of our HPC Linux cluster since 
a while. we are quite happy with xfs, thx guys for your work!
the setup is:

- dual >=1GHZ box, 4GB mem
- lvm 0.9beta7, phys. volume size ~140 GB, logical vol for xfs: 100GB
- no additional mount options or options for mkfs.xfs were given 
- kernel 2.4.8pre4-xfs, highly patched SuSE 7.0 (not that it should matter)

a user complained that rm -rf of 400MB  takes ~10 minutes (!) until
the 
command returns, whereas on the systems with reiserfs we have e.g. it 
takes seconds.

i don't know so much about the quality of the data, my guess is that some
files 
are small (~100k), others a big (a few hundred MB). i read in the FAQ that
XFS isn't particular good in rm-rf'ing  files, which isn't really the
issue for
us, because in 99.9%of the time data is being read from the volume and not
removed via rm -rf.

is there an mount/filecreation option to tweak without loosing performance
while 
reading?



cheers,
                ~dirkw