Slow find on CentOS / Red Hat Enterprise 5
 

Hi all...

I'm experiencing some interesting behaviour using the find command on one of our servers running CentOS 5.

The following command:
Takes about an hour on each existing server to go through a 1.5 TB volume containing about 500,000 files.

These two servers are both running Red Hat Enterprise 4, one with a Dell Powervault MD1000 SATA enclosure and the other with a Dell Powervault 220S SCSI enclosure array attached so it isn't a SCSI vs. SATA speed issue.

Here's the weird bit, I recently comissioned a CentOS 5 box to do the same job, this one is exactly the same hardware as one of the previously mentioned servers (the one with the MD1000 SATA enclosure), it has more files on it (1.4 million) but less overall data (1.1 TB)

This server takes 16 hours to execute the aforementioned command!!

Any thoughts, because I'm thinking of rolling back to CentOS 4.

Version of find in CentOS / Red Hat Enterprise 4 is: 4.1.20
Version of find in CentOS / Red Hat Enterprise 5 is: 4.2.27

All servers are using LVM on the external enclosures.

Rather than downgrade the entire OS, have you consodered just downgrading the findutils package which contains find?

Sorry, I should have pointed out that the motive for downgrading the whole OS was to bring the server in line with the others, I was trialing CentOS 5 with a view to upgrading the others.

However, I will try downgrading findutils as it would be nice to pinpoint where the problem lies and if it turns out to be a bug we can get it patched upstream.