Deleting files and directories is slow in a UFS filesystem (Doc ID 1017512.1)

Last updated on DECEMBER 18, 2023

Applies to:

Symptoms

Running truss on a process thus affected, will show the system call unlink(2) taking tens to hundreds of milliseconds.

This time varies, depending on the size of the file being unlinked.

   $ truss -D rm testfile
...
0.4962     unlink("testfile")                              = 0
...

The problem is exacerbated when doing removals of hierarchies of large files.

Cause