Red Hat

Hi,

I've some directory that I used as working directory for a program. At the end of the procedure, the content is deleted. This directory, when I do a ls -l, appears to still take up some space. After a little research, I've seen on a another board of this forum that it's not really taking space, but it's still reporting the inodes that it was using. Those inodes are marked as reusable so I don't loose any space.

My question is, does this affect the performance of the filesystem at all?
I know the easy solution is to erase the directory and recreate it.
But for my personal enlightenment I would really like to know.

Thanks in advance
Benoit Desmarais

ls -l does not report overall directory size as far as I know.

Are you deleting the content of the files or the files themselves?

Inode usage does not affect performance in any way, there isn't any performance penalty for using them (or not using them).

Disk performance is usually affected by the number of reads/writes you do at a single time (aka I/O operations), the physical area of the disk you use (the inner tracks of the disk rim are faster) and the spin velocity of the platter - This of course does not apply for solid state disks.

As long as you don't run out of inodes, the only problem that may arise is that you run out of disk space.

I know it's not reporting the overall size.
Perhaps I should link to that thread: www .unix. com/hp-ux/148724-empty-directory-big-size.html (Remove the spaces, I cannot link it directly, seems you need at least 5 posts to link directly and I'm a new member here....)

It's exactly as described in the thread. I wanted to know if there was in performance issue to that.

Well, that thread belongs to HP-UX and I wouldn't expect an inode to work the same on VxFS and Ext3/Ext4; things can be a lot different from platform to platform.

In RHEL, a file or a directory (which by strict linx definition is also a type of file) only uses a single inode, no matter what.

For a better overview of the real disk usage you can use "df" or "du".

I understand that things can be very different from a HPUX to a RHEL. But I do have the same behavior. I know that it's not taking any space on my filesystem, as seen with the du command. But since ls is reporting a number, I was wondering if there was a downside using that directory instead of creating a new one. Performance wise and not disk space wise. Does the filesystem check somethings beforehand related to that number on the directory that could impact performance in the long run?

No. No performance hits are directly related to inode information - not since 2.6 kernel branch.