the pause that removes

Lowell Gilbert freebsd-questions-local at be-well.ilk.org
Sat Mar 14 08:02:54 PDT 2009


prad <prad at towardsfreedom.com> writes:

> one of the neat things i've found about freebsd vs linux is the
> 'instantaneous' rm.
>
> when you remove a large file or a substantial directory, freebsd does
> it right away ard you get your prompt back, while with every linux i've
> tried, you wait and wait and wait.
>
> i presume freebsd just takes the pointer to the file out so it can be
> overwritten, while may be the linuxes fill stuff with zeros or
> something like that??
>
> is this instantaneity a result of the ufs file system vs say ext3 or
> reiser?

I've never noticed that large directory trees were "instantaneous" to
remove on any filesystem.  I haven't done any benchmarks, either,
though.  I'm not going to accept it as a real FreeBSD advantage unless I
saw some solid benchmarks...

-- 
Lowell Gilbert, embedded/networking software engineer, Boston area
		http://be-well.ilk.org/~lowell/


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