[H-GEN] Slow mkdir on ext3?

[David Harrison]

Heyall,

Long shot question - we've migrated one of our file servers to our VPS
service recently and have started having problems with really slow mkdirs.

It can take up to two minutes sometimes to complete a mkdir command - strace
shows it stops straight after issuing the system call, then it just sits
there thinking, then it finally returns normally.

There are no other problems (..that I'm aware of) on the box - it is a
http-based file server and does little else. I/O is fine, CPU usage is
normal - everything else ticks over nicely.

The filesystem is ext3, mounted with noatime,nodiratime,errors=remount-ro.
It's a large-ish volume - 4.1TB - but we've had similar volume sizes before
running under ext3 and have never had this problem before, so I'm wondering
if it is some weird artifact of running this server under Xen. It is only
this particular VPS; no other VPSs that we have are exhibiting this problem
(this is the only one with a really large mounted volume).

Google indicates a few people have had this specific problem before, but no
resolution I can find. While it's not a complete showstopper, it is
thoroughly annoying and I'm concerned it might affect other users running
similar configurations so I'm wondering if anyone has seen a similar problem
before?

Thanks,

--
david / ausgamers / mammoth vps
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