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Subject: Re: Slow directory listing
Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2007 12:55:06 -0700
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From: "Anton Ivanov" <Anton DOT Ivanov AT voxify DOT com>
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>> I experience a problem whereby 'ls' of a directory takes upwards of
20
>> seconds.  I've searched around the archives and found reports of
issues
>> that could be similar (i.e. slow bash completion) but it didn't seem
>> like any action was taken.

>Cygwin is slow.  This is by design.  20 seconds even sounds pretty fast
>for a large directory.

>It's not clear whether you mean you were doing "ls -l" or just "ls",
but
>in either case expect to wait.  In order to provide a POSIX environment
>Cygwin has to synthesize a number things that the system does not
>provide, or does not provide in a convenient or efficient interface. 
>Examples: symlinks, the executable mode bit, and .exe-magic.  Just
>running 'ls' means that every file in the directory has to be
indivually
>queried and opened (and in some cases read from) in order to provide
all
>the fields in the POSIX stat struct, compared to running the native
>"dir" command which can simply read out the entries from the directory
>and nothing else.

As I said the directory for which the listing takes a long time to
produce contains only 22 entries.
I tried 'ls', not 'ls -l'.

Are you saying that in order to construct a 'stat' structure for a
directory, cygwin must examine the contents of subdirectories?
This sounds too strange to believe.  Which fields of 'stat' in
particular require this?  Why is it that listing '/' is not at all slow?

It still appears to me that in my particular case the slow-down is not
necessary.

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