Hello! I'm new here so hopefully I'm posting in the right forum.

Got a storage that is NFS mounted to a Sun box running Solaris 8.
When I run a pattern matching ls or rm, it will take as long as 1-2mins to
complete. Patterns are usually consist of prefix and a *, for example...
"ls -l abc123*" or "rm -f abc123*"

Pattern matching ls or rm will be nearly instant the 2nd time I run it, but
1-2mins the 1st time.

The directory is huge. Contains some 100k to 500k small 20k sized files.

I get really fast response if I ls or rm with the exact file name.

Is this normal?

I was told it's a bandwidth issue but I could transfer a large 180MB file
to the NFS storage in 10secs.

Any help much appreciated.

This is normal, it has to do with the number of files within the folder. Use "find" + "xargs" to limit the number of output; I remember that we had such discussion a while ago here, let me see the search option
P.S. I can't find anything useful, but having in mind that this is NFS mounted folder would add even more latency, given the RPC calls.

The output is no more than 2-5 lines though... as only 2-5 files will match.

That's the problem, for ls the issue is not the size of files, but the size of the directory. I am not going to explain at length why this happens, but Perderabo has previously done so a number of times, for example here.

I understand the operation will be slow.. but 2-5mins slow?
On a local disk, it will take about 1-3 sec to complete the call.

I understand that NFS mounted storage will be slower but from 1-3 secs to
2-5 mins?

I read Perderabo's post.. but still...

When I search for a specific file in the directory... I get instant response.
It's when I search for files using a wild card that I get very very poor
performance...

(Say file abc12345.html vs abc123*.html)

The issue is with the wildcard itself, take a look at glob(), consider 100 000 system glob() calls, add NFS latency, RPC calls, slow network, overloaded server, and you'll get the answer, whereas strict file match is a different thing. "Is the file there - yes / no" - pretty simple.