[Fedora] Re: Alternatives to du

[Tony Nelson]

At 8:30 AM -0400 4/11/07, Mark Haney wrote:
>Les Mikesell wrote:
>> Alan Cox wrote:
>>>> I started a du on my 250 gig backuppc partition when I read the first
>>>> message in this thread.  It hasn't finished yet.  It doesn't have a
>>>> single very large directory - just very many filenames.  I thought
>>>> this thread was about du taking a long time to complete, not just one
>>>> kind of layout that exhibits the problem.
>>>
>>> Ok That is interesting and since its not a single very large directory
>>> ought not to be happening
>>>
>>> Your backuppc partition is on what kind of media and file system ?
>>
>> It's a reiserfs created several years ago on RAID1/IDE drives.  At the
>> time it seemed much faster at creating/deleting files than the other
>> filesystem choices. The status for the hashed/pooled filename directory
>> says:
>> Pool is 162.22GB comprising 2576727 files and 4369 directories
>> But there are many more hardlinks into this pool representing the tree
>> structure of each of the machines for each backup run.
>>
>> If the du ever finishes I'll get a count of actual filenames.
>>
>
>You know, I have a lot of hardlinks in my filesystem as well.  I wonder
>if that's some of the problem on my end, too.

I see that du has a --count-links option to "count sizes many times", which
I suspect means that by default du tries to track hard link usage and count
each the storage only once.  I haven't looked at the source code.  If du is
tracking a lot of hard links, it might be using a lot of memory -- I'd
think it would have to store the inode number for each multi-linked file.
I don't know what it does with hard-linked directories (but don't use
hard-linked directories!).
-- 
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