Reduce traverse time of large directory trees on Linux
Every Linux admin is familiar with the long time running through a large directory tree (with hundred of thousands of files and more) can take. Most are aware that if you re-run the same run-through, it will be shorter.
This is caused by a short-valid filesystem cache, where the memory is allocated to other tasks, or the metadata required cache exceeds the available for this task.
If the system is focused on files, meaning that its prime task is holding files (like NFS server, for example) and the memory is largely available, a certain tunable can reduce recurring directory dives (like the ‘find’ or ‘rsync’ commands, which run huge amounts of attribute queries):
sysctl vm.vfs_cache_pressure=10The default value is 100. Lower values will cause the system to prefer keeping this cache. A quote from kernel’s memory tunables page:
vfs_cache_pressure
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This percentage value controls the tendency of the kernel to reclaim the memory which is used for caching of directory and inode objects.
At the default value of vfs_cache_pressure=100 the kernel will attempt to reclaim dentries and inodes at a “fair” rate with respect to pagecache and swapcache reclaim. Decreasing vfs_cache_pressure causes the kernel to prefer to retain dentry and inode caches. When vfs_cache_pressure=0, the kernel will never reclaim dentries and inodes due to memory pressure and this can easily lead to out-of-memory conditions. Increasing vfs_cache_pressure beyond 100 causes the kernel to prefer to reclaim dentries and inodes.
Increasing vfs_cache_pressure significantly beyond 100 may have negative performance impact. Reclaim code needs to take various locks to find freeable directory and inode objects. With vfs_cache_pressure=1000, it will look for ten times more freeable objects than there are.