Re: how to remove oldest files up to a limit efficiently

[Terry Reedy]

Dan Stromberg wrote:

On Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:18:23 -0700, li******@gmail.com wrote:

>I need to mantain a filesystem where I'll keep only the most recently
used (MRU) files; least recently used ones (LRU) have to be removed to
leave space for newer ones. The filesystem in question is a clustered fs
(glusterfs) which is very slow on "find" operations. To add complexity
there are more than 10^6 files in 2 levels: 16³ dirs with equally
distributed number of files inside.

>Any suggestions of how to do it effectively?

os.walk once.

Build a list of all files in memory.

Sort them by whatever time you prefer - you can get times from os.stat.

Since you do not need all 10**6 files sorted, you might also try the
heapq module. The entries into the heap would be (time, fileid)

[linuxnow]

On Jul 9, 7:08*pm, Terry Reedy <[e-mail]:

Dan Stromberg wrote:

On Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:18:23 -0700, [e-mail] wrote:

I need to mantain a filesystem where I'll keep only the most recently
used (MRU) files; least recently used ones (LRU) have to be removed to
leave space for newer ones. The filesystem in question is a clustered fs
(glusterfs) which is very slow on "find" operations. To add complexity
there are more than 10^6 files in 2 levels: 16³ dirs with equally
distributed number of files inside.

Any suggestions of how to do it effectively?

os.walk once.

Build a list of all files in memory.

Sort them by whatever time you prefer - you can get times from os.stat.

Since you do not need all 10**6 files sorted, you might also try the
heapq module. *The entries into the heap would be (time, fileid)

I'll look into it: probably sorting dirs by atime and adding the files
inside to the heapq until I can remove enough of them would work very
efficiently.

Thanks
Pau