many small files causes for slow copy

[danielb2]

I'm using rsync to copy many small files. They're about 1-2K. Using rsync to transfer 200K worth of files takes about 1.5-2 minutes. Similarly, simply deleting the files with rm -rf also took about 1.5-2 minutes.

Creating a 25mb file using: time dd if=/dev/zero of=blah bs=1024 count=25600 also took 1.5-2 minutes.

is this a caching issue?