RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.

Description of problem:

From upstream commit b73d8f7667aa82ece204a9a2e5467b54a8ecd059:

Currently xfs_attr_inactive causes a synchronous transactions if we are
removing a file that has any extents allocated to the attribute fork, and
thus makes XFS extremely slow at removing files with out of line extended
attributes. The code looks a like a relict from the days before the busy
extent list, but with the busy extent list we avoid reusing data and attr
extents that have been freed but not commited yet, so this code is just
as superflous as the synchronous transactions for data blocks.


This is a significant performance issue for RHEL since we have selinux
on by default, and this makes it more likely for other xattrs to exist out of line.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

RHEL 6.2 beta

How reproducible:

every time, with the right sized xattrs

Steps to Reproduce:
1. create a large directory tree with many files containing xattrs large enough to go out of line
2. time rm -rf the top level directory

  
Actual results:

significant slowness

Expected results:

reasonable quickness

This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion
in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux maintenance release. Product Management has 
requested further review of this request by Red Hat Engineering, for potential
inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Update release for currently deployed 
products. This request is not yet committed for inclusion in an Update release.

I'll pick this one up, Eric.

Patch(es) available on kernel-2.6.32-203.el6

Since the problem described in this bug report should be
resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a
resolution of ERRATA.

For information on the advisory, and where to find the updated
files, follow the link below.

If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report.

http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2011-1530.html