Irregular time-delay while deleting files

Question

I have a very general question. I am running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation release 6.2 (Santiago) in a network where my workstation from time to time needs an annoyingly long period to remove small files/folders. Is there a way to check this behaviour, like the origin and why it appears when? Ofc the network might be overloaded but why is this occuring while deleting and not when I need lots of performance. Is there a difference for the several machines of the network?

I have very little knowledge of linux administration. Thx in advance.

Answer 1

The most likely reason is network traffic. If this is a typical network, you are working on shared drives that are hosted as NFS shares by a central server. If a lot of users are performing I/O operations on these drives at the same time, the whole network will slow down.

In my old lab we sometimes had whole network crashes that could last minutes because some idiot (sometimes this idiot unfortunately) was reading/writing from/to the network drive instead of his local one. The recommended procedure if you have to do a lot of reading/writing from a network share is to first copy the data to your local drive and work on it there. Once you're finished, move the result back to the network share.

So, the basic answer is that your problem depends on the current network system load.