Hello Andreas, sorry for the late reply. As you suggested it was a matter of sync_permissions. After disabling sync_permission recursive chmod and chown operations are taking "normal" time to complete. Thank you very much for the info. On a separate but somehow close issue, can you suggest any tuning on speeding up "stat" and "listdir" operations. We are using a python script, which go es thru a folder structure with a lot of files and dirs. It uses "os.listdir", which is essentially posix ls. I`ve read in the manual about directory statahead and agl. I`ll try later today or tomorrow playing with the window size. Also a simple "time lfs ls" shows faster execution time than "time ls", so I`ll probably have to talk with the dev guy about implementing "lfs ls" instead the posix ls. Cheers, Nikolay On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 6:12 PM, Dilger, Andreas <andreas.dilger(a)intel.com&gt;wrote: