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Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2010 10:52:19 -0500
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Subject: Re: incredibly slow file listing script on windoze 7 pro 4 core 64 bit
From: mike marchywka <marchywka AT gmail DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
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On 9/8/10, Eric Blake <eblake AT russianhut DOT comie> wrote:
> On 09/08/2010 09:24 AM, Larry Hall (Cygwin) wrote:
>> To somewhat sooth your curiousity, Windows (or perhaps it's more accurate
>> to say NTFS) ain't great with directories with a large number of files.
>> I expect you would be less than impressed with the performance of of 'dir'
>> in 'cmd.exe' in the same directory. That said, you're asking for allot
>> more
>> work than you may realize when doing the same thing in Cygwin. In order to

I don't want to add more clutter with this contrived example but
just to make a point, I just got a 500G WD USB disk and sent these
things to their final resting place. I had to reformat it is as vfat as that
seems to be the only thing that is RW everywhere. I ran the script
on this newer debian install with vfat and USB disk and it is faster
than 'doze and probably faster than old emachines because I now
have 2.8ghz CPU LOL.




>> fill in the information you ask for when you use the '-l' flag for 'ls',
>> Cygwin needs to open and close the files, which takes a good chunk of time
>> en masse. The same does not need to happen in Linux/UNIX-land.
>
> Additionally, the stat() interface is puny - it MUST take the time to
> fill out the complete struct, even if the caller only cares for part of
> the information.  If the Linux kernel ever incorporates the pending
> xstat() kernel call[1], then cygwin adds support for it, and coreutils
> is taught to make good use of it, then operations like ls can be sped up
> by asking for only the portions of the stat data that they plan on
> actually using, letting cygwin skip the work of obtaining the rest of
> the stat information just to be thrown away by the caller.
>
> [1]version 6 of that kernel patch is still being debated; as recently as
> http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1008.2/00274.html
>

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