Patent ID: 7509329

Claim:
A method for accelerating file deletion of a file served by a storage system, comprising: invoking a file deletion operation to delete a selected file; reading, in response to the file deletion operation, a high-level indirect block of a buffer tree of the selected file to locate one or more low-level indirect blocks referenced by the high-level indirect block; issuing read requests, in response to locating the one or more low-level indirect blocks, for the one or more low-level indirect blocks; processing a first low-level indirect block of the one or more low-level indirect blocks in parallel with executing the read requests; preloading into a buffer cache memory a number of one or more low-level indirect blocks that were read while the first low-level block is being processed, wherein the number, of the one or more low-level indirect blocks to be preloaded, chosen to ensure that the one or more low-level indirect blocks do not overflow the buffer cache memory; and freeing data blocks referenced by pointers of the first low-level indirect block in response to the file deletion operation to delete the data blocks.