Quick way to delete 240GB of files?

[v0n]

1.5Gb a day is really bad. Even if it's thousands of small files. Something is going wrong with the drive tbh.

 

[wesley]

put a block of magnet on top of the hard drive for 5 mins and it'll delete everything

 

[feenster99]

I can only assume something else was happening on the server. After the initial really slow batch, i ran it again (simple rm -Rf /files) and it deleted much faster. Still took a while to delete ~230GB of data, but it wasn't anywhere near as slow.

Thanks for all the advice though.

Matt

 

[Dj_Jestar]

that's probably because you removed the verbose flag..

 

[Ethics]

that's probably because you removed the verbose flag..

lol

 

[Bluelion]

Yes something must have been up with it (assuming you weren't really using the verbose flag over a slow network link? oO ). We regularly delete 100,000 files (about 9 Gbs worth) and although its not instantaneous, it doesn't take much longer than a few minutes.

 

[thegoonden]

It's defo the -v
even on a local drive, if you're using a framebuffer console, the -v can serisouly slow down a good file purge.

 

[feenster99]

Well, point noted for the future

 

[MikeTimbers]

Another speed up is to multi-thread it by running multiple rm statements.

 

[BillytheImpaler]

Another speed up is to multi-thread it by running multiple rm statements.

I imagine that if you're I/O limited no amount of extra processes would speed that up. In fact I think it'd make it slower as the disk's heads seek to new positions.

 

[MikeTimbers]

Deletions only need to update the drive table, not the actual file locations.