From: bruceh AT ns1 DOT ieighty DOT net (Bruce N. Hunsaker)
Subject: find, ls and wildcard expansion performance issues
22 Jan 1998 19:06:07 -0800
Message-ID: <199801201925.MAA09421.cygnus.gnu-win32@ns1.ieighty.net>
Content-Type: text
To: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com

I'm sure everyone allready knows this, but in an effort to
properly document and report this problem, I am making this
posting.

Many utilities exhibit severe file system performance problems.

Example 1: find . -name '*.EXE' -print
Example 2: ls -l   #Even worse on network drives
Example 3: echo *.EXE */*.EXE
Example 4: du .

The patched cygwin.dll in 'coolview' helps quite a bit,
but still....

In example 1, the simliar command 'dir *.EXE /s' run on NT
is 15 - 20 times faster on network drives and 12-15 times
faster on local drives (according to my tests anyway).  We are
talking here of 'DIR' times in seconds, and find or ls times
in minutes!

In order to try and isolate the problem, I booted LINUX and
did the exact same find as in Example 1.  I was expecting times
like those for DIR, but was surprised to discover that 'find'
under LINUX was 3-4 times slower than 'DIR' under NT.

Well that takes some of the problem away from gnuwin32, but
not very much of it!

I think solving this problem should be one of the top priority
items for the next release.

---
Bruce Hunsaker - bruceh AT ieighty DOT net

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