Details will vary depending on the filesystem. Bad old filesystems are O(n^2) in the # of files in a directory. ext3fs is fine. Also tools like find and and rm often do more work on a file than strictly nececssary. I'm curious why rsync would be better myself; on first blush that'd be the worst choice!

I've salvaged an unwieldy directory by using Python to directly call unlink(2). Details: http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/giant-directories.ht...