ls and du slow

[Qing Chang]

We have a cluster of 3 IBM servers that build the base of VMware
vSphere 5 virtual environment.

3 major servers are built that use XFS mainly because the size of
the filesystem: 64TB, 32TB and 5TB etc.

These servers run RHEL 6.4, the XFS filesystems are configured on
IBM Storwise V7000 subsystem through raw device mapping.

Two of them serve files through NFS and Samba, another one is
a SMTP/IMAP server.

Accessing files and emails does not seem to be slow. But simple commands
"ls" and "du" run very slow. For example, a first run of ls -l /var/spool/mail could
take 8 seconds, note we have only 1360 items in this directory.

"du" would also take much longer to run than ZFS or ext3.

I could not find any direct reference of XFS possibly having problem with
these kind commands.

Could this be due to my combination of hardware and software configuration,
or is there some tuning to be done?

Many thanks,

Qing

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Qing Chang
Senior Systems Administrator
M6-624 Research Computing
Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre
2075 Bayview Ave.
Toronto, Ontario,  M4N 3M5
(416) 480-6100 x3263
qchang at sri.utoronto.ca
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