Background: physical server, about two years old, 7200-RPM SATA drives connected to a 3Ware RAID card, ext3 FS mounted noatime and data=ordered, not under crazy load, kernel 2.6.18-92.1.22.el5, uptime 545 days. Directory doesn't contain any subdirectories, just millions of small (~100 byte) files, with some larger (a few KB) ones. We have a…