Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.5 (Tikanga) EXT3 files
 

Hi

Trying to delete Oracle Database files 4.3 terrabytes worth, there is few hundred files most are around 12gb in size, and its taking a very long time , is there a logical reason for it and is there a quicker method? then rm -f *

Is this on a RAID volume? Did you mount the directory as a separate partition or is it mounted at the root of /? Are you certain that Oracle isn't trying to lock these files in anyway? They sound like huge files, which can take a long time to delete especially on a journaling file system. So if your removing a large set of large files on a striped RAID volume on a journaling files system, then yes it can take a very long time..

There were no Oralce users on the system, and the disks are mirrored from the hardware level 0+1 or Raid 5, not 100% , it took about 5.5 hours to delete 4.3 terrabytes , is that normal ?

Ah yes forgot to mention it's not mounted on / it has it's own mount point.

Well its hard to determine that without a lot more details. The slowness your experiencing could be caused by several things. You have to take into consideration your RAID controller as well as your disk speed. It could take that long considering how large the files are. Personally I've never blanket deleted that large of a data set before, but from experience doing anything large on a RAID array seems to take forever.

Ok thanks for you reply, learning a bit more, I'm used to OPEN VMS, where it would delete that in a matter of minutes .Diffrent OS and diffrent results.I'm trying to find more about ext3 disks and what actually occurs when it deletes.

I found a good explanation from Ubuntu on the different limitations of Linux file systems, it explains in detail what happens when you delete a file from a Linux system

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Li...stemsExplained

tekhead2

Thanks I will check it out, hopefully it will give me a better understanding .

One issue is updating all the free block lists... the larger the file, the longer it takes.
Another happens with lots of small files (you don't have this)... directory rebuilds take longer

IF you happen to be deleting all files on a filesystem... it is actually faster to dismount and do a mkfs.