Re: large files

[Chris Mason <mason@suse.com>]

On Mon, 2004-05-17 at 15:48, Bernd Schubert wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm currently testing our new server and though it will primarily not serve 
> really large files (about 40-60 users will have a quota of 25GB each on a 2TB 
> array), I'm still testing the performance for large files.
> 
> So I created an about 300GB fil and the problem is to remove it now. 
> Removing it took much more than 15 minutes. Here's the the relevant top line:
> 
>  5012 root      18   0   368  368   312 D    21.9  0.0   5:48 rm
> 
> Since I didn't expect it to take so much time, I didn't measure the time to 
> delete this file.
> 
> system specifications:
> 	- dual opteron 242 (1600 MHz)
> 	- linux-2.4.26 with all patches from Chris, no further patches
> 	- reiserfs-3.6 format
> 
> The partition with the 300GB file has a size of 1.7TB.

This is most likely a combination of metadata fragmentation and the fact
that during deletes, 2.4.x reiserfs ends up reading one block at a time.

As a comparison data point, could you please try 2.6.6-mm3?  I realize
you don't want to run this kernel in production, but it would tell us if
I understand the problems at hand.

-chris