I asked a similar question about a month ago, and received some answers, but none were satisfactory or consistent with what I’m seeing.
Here’s the problem:
A user has a modelling program which produces both huge (1 to 20 Gigabyte) and numberous tiny (100 to 1000 bytes)ASCII text files. When the modelling run is completed he can have as many as 20 of the large files and literally hundreds of thousands of tiny files in a single folder.
The problem is that when he goes to delete the huge files(since they are transitional), the disk is locked to any further I/O for as long as 5-10 minutes. The drive light shows that the drive is active but Task Manager CPU useage counter shows the Idle process running at 99%. Also all perf mon counters indicate that no I/O acitivity is occuring on the disk…there are no reads, writes or anything else…yet the drive is unuseable for 5-10 minutes.
The reason this is an important problem is that this disk is connected to other computers which are doing similar modelling runs, which do disk I/O to this disk which becomes locked, causing the modelling to be aborted on the other computers whenever one of these large transition files is deleted. Note,however, that the problem still manifests when there is no connection to other computers.
Gory Details:;
System is a 1GHz PIII, with 512 Meg RAM, and the disk in question is a 80 MB Ultra100 disk.This disk also contains the system partition. It is NTFS. The OS is NT40 SP6a.
