Why do deletion operations take so long?  Doing

$ rm -rf /usr/src

     ...takes forever (half an hour, maybe).  Deleting the files is
limited to walking the inodes and modifying each one, right?  Why
does it take so long when this ATA/66 drive has an average access
time of 8ms?

     Also, I'm copying my xsrc on wd0d to a backup dir on sd0a using:

$ cp -Rf /usr/xsrc /software/backup/

     I'm running iostat and the drives (one IDE, one SCSI) are averaging
approximately:

wd0  KB/t   t/s   MB/s
     5.67    96   0.53

sd0  KB/t   t/s   MB/s
     4.59   111   0.50

     Of course, this is copying lots of small files, but it shouldn't be
that slow!!  Transferring a 220mb file from one drive to the other
only takes 30 seconds at about 6.5 mb/s, and that's pretty fast.

     I would expect transferring lots of small files to be a good bit
slower, but I wouldn't expect it to be 1/12th the speed.  Is there
anything I can do to speed it up?

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c v k @ z y b x . c o m