reading an empty directory after reboot is very slow

[Vincent Lefevre <vincent@vinc17.net>]

I have some regular directory ~/eftests/tmp, and after a reboot,
I often check that it is empty (as I remove its contents before
the reboot): from the ~/eftests directory, I do

  ypig:~/eftests> ll tmp

which corresponds to

  ls -bF --color -l tmp

after alias expansion.

The problem is that this operation is (always?) very slow: something
like 100 seconds (1 minute and 40 seconds). It has been reproducible
for several months. The logs show nothing during this operation.

Any idea?

I'm thinking of a possible hardware problem (the machine and the disk
are 5 years old), but I would have expected some message in the logs
in such a case. Is there any way to check?

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)