I've got a production server that is used 24/7.

My problem is I have an backup directory I no longer need. It is about 9 GB with thousands and thousands of tiny little files.

When I do a rm -Rf backup/ it makes the server slow down to a complete crawl, then our phones start ringing with complaining users.

I want an alternative way to remove all these files without bringing the web/email service to its knees.

Any suggestions?

Well, you can script the file deletion with a loop and small delay to prevent hitting the server hard. For example, if you have 50,000 files, you can use a .07 second sleep between files to spread the deletion over an hour (plus the actual deallocation time).

Update: I also wanted to mention that later releases (FC6 for example) make this much easier with the ionice functionality. You can set your process to low cpu and idle I/O priority, so that impact is minimal. For example:

/usr/bin/nice -n19 /usr/bin/ionice -c3 /bin/rm -rf /backup

Oh yea I think this is exactly what I was looking for... I'll try that. Thank you!

The ionice command is very handy. I've used it in the reverse situation as well. For example, on a machine that's being pounded by a long running I/O intensive operation, I can still burn a DVD without an underrun:

/usr/bin/nice -n -15 /usr/bin/ionice -c1 /usr/bin/growisofs ...

The growisofs is not a heavy user of I/O, but it is time sensitive. This insures that its requests get ordered to the top of the queue.

It was my sole driver for upgrading to FC6.