Here's another random question for youz - I've got two Debian systems at home (k6-2/400 as a server, and Athlon 1 ghz) and a colocated Red Hat server (athlon 1.4 ghz, formerly 800 mhz). Ever since I can remember, the RH machine has always taken a very long time to delete files (at least 30 seconds for a 600 MB+ directory), whereas both of my machines at home (note that they are slower in both processor speed and drive speed) delete the same size directory much quicker (a couple seconds, even with ext3). I realize that the colocated server is running many more Apache & MySQL processes, but the load on that server is very small, all things considered. Could there be any real reason for the slowness in deleting stuff on the RH box? All of the machines are running kernel 2.4.7, and none of them have sysctl tuned at all.