[mythtv-users] Disk space recovers slowly after deleting recordings

[Rod Smith]

On Tuesday 11 December 2007 03:50:17 Michael T. Dean wrote:
> On 12/11/2007 03:44 AM, Dan Cotter wrote:
> > When I delete a recording its appears to happen instantly and the file
> > appears to be gone, but the free space recovers extremely slowly
> > (viewed by console command df), like a few mega byte per second is
> > free'd.
>
> Like about 8MiB/sec?
>
> > I am running ubunutu 7.10, nothing else is installed but ubuntu and
> > mythtv and nvidia drivers for my video card.
> >
> > This is causing me some problems because sometimes when I record, it
> > must think there is not enough free space and over-writes something I
> > want to keep, even though I just deleted 10's of gigabytes of
> > recordings. Am I missing some sort of system setting here that forces
> > some sort of commit write back to disk or something?
>
> Turn off the slow deletes setting you turned on...

The drawback to doing this, as I understand it, is that the UI will freeze 
while the delete is occurring, which can take a while. If this is a problem, 
you can get the best of both worlds by disabling fast deletes and switching 
to a filesystem that's faster at deleting files, such as XFS. (I believe JFS 
is also fast at deleting files.) Unfortunately, switching from ext3fs to XFS 
will require a backup/restore operation, so you'll need a lot of free disk 
space or other storage somewhere. The pain of the switch may outweigh the 
benefits it provides, so you might just want to keep this in mind for 
whenever you plan other major changes, such as adding more disk space.

-- 
Rod Smith
http://www.rodsbooks.com