On Mar 2, 2009, at 2:34 AM, Kay Diederichs wrote: > Joseph L. Casale schrieb: >> I have an issue with a busy CentOS server exporting iSCSI and NFS/ >> SMB shares. >> Some of the files are very large, and when they get deleted IO >> climbs to an >> unacceptable rate. Is there a way to purge a file with little to no >> IO >> overhead on ext3? >> >> Thanks! >> jlc > > Have you tried to delete locally, instead of over NFS? > > Maybe by deleting over SMB from a Windows machine, the file is not > deleted but rather moved to a "Trash" folder on a different disk > (which > would explain the I/O)? (Same could happen with a Unix desktop, like > KDE) > > Have you tried the "unlink" command instead of "rm" ? > > Kay I've seen length delete times too when deleting a 30+ GB file on an ext3 filesystem, locally. I don't think that Windows (XP at least) will move remote files to a "trash" folder, only local files. Though there is no telling what it might do if you have some 3rd party application installed that may provide an "undelete" functionality. I haven't researched it enough to check I/O stats.