Re: Do too many files hurt a directory?

From: Roberto Quiroga (noswen_at_example.net)
Date: 03/26/04 

Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 15:19:16 -0300

"Charlie Gibbs" <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> escribió:

> A process went wild at a customer site the other night, and started
> creating files with gay abandon. When the staff came in the next
> morning, the system was extremely sluggish. I dialed in and found
> that over 280,000 files had been created, all in the same directory.
> All of the files belong to root (the user kicked off the process's
> parent under the wrong ID), and most of them are empty or nearly so.
> I finally managed to delete all of the files (it took the better part
> of a day), but the system is still sluggish - even a simple ls command
> takes 10 seconds or more to respond.

May be the files are still open?

Try lsof (if there is a version for your OS).

Hope this helps. 

-- 
Roberto Quiroga