FreeBSD question.

I have come across something with FreeBSD I have never seen before and
dont know what to make of it.

We have an ancient FBSD 4.1 server, dual CPU 800mhz, an old Perc 3
controller serving about 3700 accounts. It has served us well and
done its time and now have a quad-core dual cpu box, with a Perc 5/i to
replace the old one.

I installed 7.4 on the new machine a while back copied over the mail spool
and the password file (we still auth on this server via the passwd file)
and home directories.

Setting up this machine I noticed ls -l in /var/mail takes ~30 seconds
to complete:

real    0m29.277s
user    0m6.394s
sys     0m12.723s

On the 4.1 machine it takes:

real    0m0.639s
user    0m0.041s
sys     0m0.189s

Both mail spools live in /var/mail on each machine and on a RAID5
partition. Installed 8.1 on the machine and I have ls -l going about 20-25
seconds to complete.

One thing I noticed somewhat by accident is that when all the
mailboxes in /var/mail are owned by root ls -l takes this long:

real    0m0.043s
user    0m0.009s
sys     0m0.033s

I have migrated this domain to three different servers in the past ten
years, all of the servers running were running FreeBSD and I have
never seen this behaviour before.

Where to look for the bottleneck? Why is there a bottleneck? Even in the
directory where all the home dirs live an ls -l takes 20-25 seconds to
complete. Change the ownership of all dirs to root and it takes less than
a second to do ls -l.

Anyone have a clue to lend about this?
Thanks.











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