FreeBSD unresponsive after large rm -r * command
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The other day I found that our Sarg Reports folder had grown to takeover all available space on our box. I uninstalled the package as we never used it and ran an 'rm' command from the console. It finished in about an hour. During that time I just left the box alone, and my shell cursor was at a blank line. When the process finished, I got the regular prompt again. Everything was good.
Today I am working with a much larger data set on a Nas4Free box and had to delete a larger amount of files and folders (deduplicated data store from PHDVirtual Backup). It's been running for a few hours now and the box is still unresponsive. Is there a better way to delete millions of files en masse? Should I expect that other services will freeze during this operation as they have now or is this normal in a BSD/*nix envinronment?
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rm is really the only way to do it, or using something else to pass data to rm (like find /somewhere -name "foo" -type f | xargs rm).
If the system is blocking on I/O there may not be much you can do. If you can open multiple terminals, running 2+ rm's can sometimes be faster then one alone, but it's still bound by I/O limits on the drive.
