Ma Sa wrote:
> I have an issue with nfs and listing a large amount of files that I am
> wondering if I can solve with ruby. I know that ruby has better
> performance in some instances than a bash shell script so I am wondering
> if anyone has experience or some examples of how this might work...
> 
> I have a directory with a large amount of files that is mounted over
> nfs. The network is gigabit and so are the nic's. The servers are very
> high end so the hardware / network performance is not the bottleneck.
> However, sometimes it can take a very long time to list out the files
> contained within a directory.
> 
> I will do an ls and it might take 5 minutes to retrieve a response.

Do you use any external name service (LDAP/NIS/...)? If so your problem 
could be uid number to user name resolution taking too much time on so 
many files.

You can check this by running 'ls -n', if it's much faster you'll have 
to either:
- speed up name resolution (use a cache like nscd - which should be 
installed or readily available on any Linux distribution - for example).
- don't resolve names when you don't need them.

Lionel