Hi, All: We realised a problem and suspected that the problem might be related to GFS and DLM. Therefore, I am sending the email to this group. If you think my problem is irrelevant, please forgive me. ========================= We have a SAN environment, where 5 nodes running RHEL v4u4 and Redhat Cluster Suite connected to EMC AX150SCi iSCSI RAID storage (GFS+DLM, RAID10) We have a subdirectory on the storage and we are sure that no applications on these five nodes know the existence of the subdirectory. In other words, the subdirectory should be free of lock but its parent directories may have locks. The subdirectory holds more than 31700 small files and the total size of these files is about 4.3G. Within these 31700 files, about 1/3 of them are symbolic links pointing to other files at the same subdirectory. The subdirectory stat is: File: `abc' Size: 8192 Blocks: 6024 IO Block: 4096 directory Device: fc00h/64512d Inode: 1065226 Links: 2 Access: (0770/drwxrwx---) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root) Access: 2008-05-04 22:53:39.000000000 +0000 Modify: 2008-04-15 03:02:24.000000000 +0000 Change: 2008-04-15 07:11:52.000000000 +0000 Now, when I tried to ls the subdirectory from an idle node, it took ages to output the information. I then timed the ls command, and the results were shocking. # time ls -la > /dev/null real 3m5.249s user 0m0.628s sys 0m5.137s As I said that the node I used to access the subdirectory was completely idle, what could cause the long delay? We asked EMC to check the hardware (including the controller and hard drives) and was reported that there was no problem at all. Therefore, I would like to seek your kind answers to the following questions: Is the problem related to GFS and DLM? I heard GFS is not suitable for many small files. Is that true? Is the delay caused by locks applied to its parent directories? Which direction should I go to figure out what is happening and what is the underlying reason? Thanks for your time and look forward to your reply. Jas ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ -- Linux-cluster mailing list Linux-cluster@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-cluster