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Accepted
Matthieu
Asked: 2009-12-04 07:01:57 +0800 CST

du, find and load average

  • 772

I have a complex directory structure with lot of small files in it. like:

/opt/data/1000/45/32/2009/10/15/76543.zip

When I launch a du or find on this directory (/opt/data/) my server load increases a lot (0,5 --> 25) and my system doesn't respond any more.

Can I "slow down" the execution of the du/find command to keep my system accessible? I don't care if the command takes 3 days to run :-) I've tried with nice -n 19 with no success...

Thank you !

linux

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You could use "ionice" to be more gentle to the system.

    Ex:

    $ ionice du /opt/data

    You can even set the io scheduling on a pid:

    $ ionice -c 3 -p 1023

    See man page for more info on how to use "ionice"

    • 8

  2. I would do both ionice and nice:

    So after running ionice, then run renice:

    renice -n 20 -p 1023

    You could also just launch the process with nice in the first place.

    • 1