I work with big files.  Really big.  Daily, I back up a file that is larger than 200 gigabytes.  We have a Thecus N7700 network attached storage (NAS) box that holds about seven terabytes.  Every day I copy the latest stuff there and delete some of the older files.  It all works fine except for just one little problem:  deleting a 200 gigabyte file takes a long time and interrupts other processing.

How long?  More than a minute.  Seriously.  And during that time, any other process that is trying to access files on the NAS gets really slow.  Sometimes, deleting the file causes the NAS to become unresponsive so long that other processes’ IO requests time out and the program crashes.  That is not a happy state of affairs when I’m running a job that takes 36 hours.

It appears that the slowdown is due to indirect block pointer updates in the ext3 file system, as described in this post.

Is this a fundamental shortcoming of the ext3 file system?  If it is, what are my options?  The Thecus supports a file system called ZFS, but from what I’ve read about it online, I don’t want to go down that path.  I wonder if a firmware upgrade would solve my problem.