ls and du slow

[Stan Hoeppner]

On 10/28/2013 1:41 PM, Qing Chang wrote:
> 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


Hello Qing,

As a Red Hat Enterprise Linux customer your contract entitles you to Red
Hat customer support.  Support provided by this list is primarily for
XFS as shipped in non-proprietary 'upstream' kernels.

RHEL and SLES customers should always contact their Linux vendor for
assistance with such issues.  After all that's why you paid for Linux
instead of using a free distribution.

-- 
Stan