XFS is always dog-slow at deletions, and is pathologically slow[1] in the most common use case -- "rm -R". It has a huge amount of synchronization overhead for

XFS is always dog-slow at deletions, and is pathologically slow[1] in the most common use case -- "rm -R". It has a huge amount of synchronization overhead for deletions, made much worse by the fact that rm is listing directories while it deletes things, and XFS is trying to do these things in parallel. If you build the list of files to delete up-front, it is almost normal. [1] I have repeatedly run into cases where it takes much longer to delete something than it does to write it, especially when your disk has bad latency spikes.