I have an HP-UX server with a Network Appliance Filer attached over Gigabit Ethernet. I am noticing very slow response time when using "ls -l" on one directory on one of the several NFS mounted filesystems. The "ls" command by itself does not seem to be a problem. Typically I get a response within 30 seconds on this directory but sometimes it has taken as much as 12 minutes to respond!! There are less than 50 files in this directory and it is only nested a few directories deep. I have not noticed this with any directories in any of the other filesystems mounted in the same manner. All other directories will give me a file listing in less than 1 second. If I use the command twice in succession then the second time responds very quickly. I am assuming this is coming from cache.

I even tried mounting the same filesystem over NFS to another similar system and I do not experience this problem.

We do seem to be experiencing some sort of slow down in our database and I am not sure if it is related to this particular symptom or not.

I was not able to find anything on HP's knowledgebase nor Netapp's. Has anyone else experienced anything like this?