Why is GFS slow doing things like ls -lr * whereas ls -r * is fast?
Mostly due to design constraints. An ls -r * can simply traverse the directory structures, which is very fast. An ls -lr * has to traverse the directory, but also has to stat each file to get more details for the ls. That means it has to acquire and release a cluster lock on each file, which can be slow. We’ve tried to address these problems with the new GFS2 file system.
