[plug] evil performance on large directories.

[Shayne O'Neill]

The server I run at the murdoch guild has a couple of monster directories.
The shared student drive where our lovely student reps have promptly
dumped 10 million cubic tonnes of debris all into the root , and the www
directory (ugh. webdesigners... We now have a cms that puts an end to
that, but the debris is all there still)

Regardless, any operations that require a listing seem to take ages. ls
can pause for up to two minutes. connecting via appletalk takes ages, and
the macs which habitually ask for full directory listings over and over
again can really get stuck on this. But I dont think its an appletalk
problem

The drive runs ext3 with a journal , 7200rpm , snappy etc.

The box is a debian woody with 'bits of sarge and backports mashed in'
running a 2.6.8-2-k7 kernel.

Any idea what might be the cause of this? It really causes alot of
problems.

Shayne.

--
 I wish a robot would get elected president. That way, when he came to
town, we could all take a shot at him and not feel too bad.
- Jack Handey (And now, Deep thoughts)