filesystems - directory with 980MB meta data, millions of files, how to delete it? (ext3)

Hello,

So I'm stuck with this directory:

drwxrwxrwx 2 dan users 980M 2010-12-22 18:38 sessions2

The directories contents is small - just millions of tiny little files.

I want to wipe it from the filesystem but have been unable to. My first try was:

find sessions2 -type f -delete

and

find sessions2 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f

but had to stop because both caused escalating memory usage. At one point it was using 65% of the system's memory.

So I thought (no doubt incorrectly), that it had to do with the fact that dir_index was enabled on the system. Perhaps find was trying to read the entire index into memory?

So I did this (foolishly): tune2fs -O^dir_index /dev/xxx

Alright, so that should do it. Ran the find command above again and... same thing. Crazy memory usage.

I hurriedly ran tune2fs -Odir_index /dev/xxx to reenable dir_index, and ran!

2 questions:

1) How do I get rid of this directory on my live system? I don't care how long it takes, as long as it uses little memory and little CPU. By the way, using nice find ... I was able to reduce CPU usage, so my problem right now is only memory usage.

2) I disabled dir_index for about 20 minutes. No doubt new files were written to the filesystem in the meanwhile. I reenabled dir_index. Does that mean the system will not find the files that were written before dir_index was reenabled since their filenames will be missing from the old indexes? If so and I know these new files aren't important, can I maintain the old indexes? If not, how do I rebuild the indexes? Can it be done on a live system?

Thanks!