Hi, On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 08:35, William L. Maltby <CentOS4Bill at triad.rr.com> wrote: > One thing to keep in mind is that ls must sort the file list. Not only sorting, but usually "ls" ends up trying to find out if the file is a directory, which uses a "stat" syscall for each of the files. This is always expensive on remote filesystems (e.g., NFS) and I would expect it to be also the case in GFS. Besides the "-U" option of "ls", you might want to look at other options that would make "ls" not try to "stat" each file. I'm not sure exactly which of them, but one I can think of is disabling color (since color will trigger a "stat" to find if the file is a directory). In general, having directories with a huge number of files tends to be a bad idea, you will most likely have performance bottlenecks with specific filesystems or tools. If possible, try to change the application to create two or three levels of directories using a hash on the filename and then creating directories with a small number of files on each of them. HTH, Filipe