Removing a very large folder (~40GB) with lots of files efficiently in linux

Question

I'd like to remove a folder with lots of files (namely millions of) efficiently. When I issue rm -rf folder/ it takes hours and I have to kill it. I'm wondering whether there is a magical way of doing this faster? Another thing is when I want to get the size of the folder with du -hs folder/ it also takes very very long time, I was never patient to wait for it and killed after several hours.

Thanks,

Answer 1

Have a look at this question: http://serverfault.com/questions/183821/rm-on-a-directory-with-millions-of-files