Very large directory

[Bill Vermillion]

> 
> From: "Phillip Salzman" <phill at sysctl.net>
> Subject: Very large directory

> I have a pair of servers that act as SMTP/AV gateways. It
> seems that even though we've told the AV software not to store
> messages, it is anyway.
>
> They've been running for a little while now - and recently we've
> noticed a lot of disk space disappearing. Shortly after that, a
> simple du into our /var/spool returned a not so nice error:

> 	du: fts_read: Cannot allocate memory

> No matter what command I run on that directory, I just don't
> seem to have enough available resources to show the files let
> alone delete them (echo *, ls, find, rm -rf, etc.)

Even   echo *   sorts the output, and the sorting consumes a large
amount of resources.

Try and   ls with a  "-f" option.

To prove it to yourself take any directory and perform
echo *  and then do the same with   ls -f

I first noticed this years ago when on an old SysV I had a
directory that took 5 minutes to display and the ls -f was quite
fast.


> End of freebsd-stable Digest, Vol 95, Issue 8

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com