Long tar extractions

[pmcmicha]

Issue:

When unarchiving tar files on some of our servers, I am running into long extraction times for a paticular directory. There are about 1,000,000+ files in this directory all with 444 permission. This slice is about 200 GB.

The servers are running Solaris 5.8 with 2 processers (@ 1200 MHz) and 4,096 MB ram. The one server that was rebooted recently (within the last day) can untar to this directory very quickly, but the other server that has been up for 64+ days untars at a very slow pace. (Unarchiving takes hours.)

Is there some sort of buffer or whatever that is cleared out at reboot? Or perhaps the this filesystem (ufs) needs the reboot to do some sort of indexing? (Nothing I have read indicates this, but I figure it cannot hurt to ask.) Could this potential issue have anything to do with a tmpfs?

Thanks in advance.

 

[elgrandeperro]

Are you always "recreating" the troublesome tar directory?

Seeking through long directory listings is a well known bottleneck of most Unixes.

Don't think it would have anything to do with tmpfs.

Truss it out, bet it spends time seeking in the directory.

gene

 

[pmcmicha]

elgrandeperro,

We have jobs that promote files to this permanent directory on a regular basis.

Truss shows that the file is always removed and then replaced by tar during extraction. (Creating lots of I/O.) But what I cannot understand is why this problem does not always exist. Anytime they reboot, for the first few days the tar extractions are extremely fast, but after that, it takes a longer period of time to unarchive.

The ufs slice supports logging and largefiles, it is about 200 GB, and currently using about 100 GB.