On Mar 2, 2009, at 7:06 AM, "Joseph L. Casale" <JCasale at activenetwerx.com > wrote: >> Have you tried to delete locally, instead of over NFS? > > As I said, the deletes are done locally via ssh. > >> Have you tried the "unlink" command instead of "rm" ? > > Nope, but I will now! If it's not too late you could try XFS as I believe it is efficient in handling large files. Or you could try a different journal option to your ext3 fs. Problem is the fragmentation that occurs with these files created over NFS and how ext3 deallocates extents. -Ross