find and Itanium Servers

[Ralf Buchhold]

Hello
I have a problem with our itanium servers
(rx2640) and the find command.
The find command uses too much memory. And sometimes the server seens to be halted.
Thank you
Ralf

[Cheryl Griffin]

What is the syntax of the find command?
Are there errors being logged to syslog?

This could be indicative of a very large filesystem, filesystem corruption or possibly a bad disk?

[Pete Randall]

Ralf,

I don't know as this is particular to itanium. The find command is notorious for being resource intensive: consuming cpu cycles, disk bandwidth and memory. In a performance tuning class years ago, one of our exercises involved bringing a box to its knees by running multiple find commands.


Pete

[Nicolas Dumeige]

Hello,

If you use the -exec option change it for xargs :
find . -exec grep -il pattern {} \;
find . | xargs -i grep -il pattern {}

Only one instance of grep will be created on not one for every item find will bring.

Cheers

Nicolas

[Bernhard Mueller]

Ralf,

I agree with Pete and a common suggestion for a CPU friendly way of looking for files named "*log*" is something like:

cd /somedir ; ls -R | grep -e ":" -e "log"

Regards,
Bernhard

[Bernhard Mueller]

Ralf,

I just double-checked the ls alternative: it seems to consume even more CPU ....

that was a bad tip...

Regards
Bernhard