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/var/www/website contains the files that powers a website, and /var/www/media contains many tiny media files like images in subdirectories named after their date of creation. Deleting/pruning an entire subdirectory of many tiny files hogs the IO and slows the server to a crawl for hours.

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Problem: I believe disabling ext4 journaling can speed up the deletion, is that true?

If so, is it advisable for the main website files at /var/www/website to have journaling disabled as well, since they both reside in the same ext4 filesystem /dev/md4.

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Why even configure a journalizing filesystem if you are just going to gut its primary feature. Try using ext2 if you want to run this way. I wish you luck and a lot of time waiting for fscks! – mdpc Mar 14 at 2:29
It was the default filesystem that came with Ubuntu 12.04 which is being used for the web server. – Nyxynyx Mar 14 at 2:31
I guess that is why one might not want to do a default installation. – mdpc Mar 14 at 2:33
How about the data=writeback option instead of disabling journaling completely? I heard that ex4 without journaling is faster than ext2. – Nyxynyx Mar 14 at 2:39
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@mdpc, ext4 without journaling still has many advantages over ext2. – psusi Mar 14 at 3:47
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closed as not a real question by mdpc, mgorven, Khaled, Scott Pack, Michael Hampton Mar 16 at 23:46

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

1 Answer

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You can use tune2fs -O ^journal to remove the journal from the fs while it is unmounted, or mount it with the -o noload option to disable the journal ( temporary for the latter ), but this will make filesystem corruption more likely in the event of a crash or power fail, and at the least, will require a lengthy fsck after.

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I guess I will stick is data=writeback – Nyxynyx Mar 14 at 4:31

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