[Lustre-discuss] Frequent system calls cause high load on meta data server

[Christian Becker]

Dear colleagues,

one of our users calls within his R application an external program via 
the system function very often (/home is a lustre file system):


  for (i=0;i<10000;i++)
  {
    system("/home/user/bin/program arg0 arg1 ....");
  }

The runtime for the external program is only a few seconds. With hundred 
of these jobs running, the load on the meta data server goes up to 25 
(2way quad core with lustre 1.8.3).


Is such a behavior known, if yes, how can I avoid it?


best regards,
Christian