Trouble Deleting Files

I've had this problem on and off for a long, long time, but it is really starting to drive me nuts.  I often can't delete files.  Or, maybe I can delete them, but it either takes multiple tries or it takes several minutes to complete a single delete operation.  Nothing shows up from my unRAID syslog that even suggests I attempted a delete operation.

Attempting to delete a single file at a time increases the odds that I'll be able to do a delete operation, but not always.  Also, I've run into lots of problems dealing with large numbers of small files, but these problems are with large (20-200GB) files.

The delete operations just seem to hang.  After a while my machine says it can't connect to tower.  After a couple minutes I'll be able to connect to the shares again, but delete operations will still often fail.

I'll probably get some grief over this, but I'm still running 4.5.4.  I never ended up upgrading because there always seemed to be reports of serious bugs that Tom needed to fix.  I figured I was either going to wait until a bug-free 4.x version, or the final v5.  And, about a year ago I concluded v5 final had to be just around the corner... 

I'm a little reluctant to change the software, since at least "normal" read and write operations work fine- just not deletes. But, I guess I'll upgrade (to what?) if I have to, given that I'm running out of space and I have about 2TB of stuff that is safe to delete.  I'd rather not do it during one of Tom's AWOL cycles though...

Is this a known bug in the earlier releases?

Sounds like a known issue of a full ReiserFS volume. If you can add a drive slot now and rebalance things a little, it will help. When you get over 75-90% full, file operations can take a long time compared to an empty drive. If I were you, I'd just add a drive (get a 3TB and short stroke it to 2TB if you are going to upgrade soon) and call it done for now. Maybe upgrade to 4.7, since the 5.x series assumes a stable 4.7 array to upgrade from.

Sounds like a known issue of a full ReiserFS volume. If you can add a drive slot now and rebalance things a little, it will help. When you get over 75-90% full, file operations can take a long time compared to an empty drive. If I were you, I'd just add a drive (get a 3TB and short stroke it to 2TB if you are going to upgrade soon) and call it done for now. Maybe upgrade to 4.7, since the 5.x series assumes a stable 4.7 array to upgrade from.

My drives are relatively full right now (around 80-85% on several drives).  How would I even rebalance things?  If I can't delete stuff I probably can't move stuff either.

Though, part of what I'm doing here is trying to avoid adding a drive.  I've run out of SATA ports.  Plus I don't particularly need more space.  The main thing I'm trying to delete are 2TB of monthly full disk images from my old workstation that I'm not even using anymore.  I certainly don't need 10 months worth of full backups. 

Since you don't want to add drives, your best option is probably going to be to do your cleanup from the console, either locally or telnet. Midnight commander (mc) is the easiest way to navigate around and delete things.

Is this always going to be a problem when the drives get to be around 80% full?  That seems pretty awful... 

Plus, I swear I've had similar problems when the drives were much less full.  Delete operations have always been slow.  But the whole not being able to delete stuff after multiple attempts is new.

Also, telnetting in and deleting files manually (using rm) isn't going so well either...  A  couple smaller (~500MB) files deleted OK, but the 200GB backup image is taking a long, long time.  We'll see if it actually completes.  It's been hung up for a few minutes now.

The advantage of deleting files at the console is that it will return eventually when the operation completes, unlike a network connection that times out. If the operation is taking so long that you need to do other things with your host machine, use screen so you can leave the session active after the telnet connection is closed.

Deleting very large files that are fragmented all over the disk because of how full it is will take a long time. That's pretty much just the way it is.

What can I do to workaround this problem?  I'm running into an issue where Acronis isn't able to delete the automatic backups that are scheduled for deletion.  So, the operations sometimes silently fail, and then I end up with a backlog of backups that need to be deleted manually.  Should I be telling Acronis to break things up into smaller files? 

Should I be telling Acronis to break things up into smaller files?

2GB?  Eeck.  I'm not sure I want to have 100 2GB files for each full image backup.  I was thinking more like 20GB.  My blu-ray rips are often slow to delete, but they at least delete before timeouts occur.