Okay, hit this one today and it seems weird/buggy.
I'm unsure whether it's pkg_info itself or some artifact of perl's
runtime, but I had cause to slap ktrace on pkg_info and while
browsing through the kdump info, I discovered that it was doing a
stat(2) on every file in the $CWD.
To reproduce:
$ mkdir -p ~/tmp/poc/{empty,full}
$ cd ~/tmp/poc/full
$ jot 100 | xargs touch
$ ktrace -f ../full.ktrace pkg_info -Q remind
$ cd ../empty
$ ktrace -f ../empty.ktrace pkg_info -Q remind
$ cd ..
then
$ for f in full.ktrace empty.ktrace ; do echo -n $f ; kdump -f $f": " | grep
-c 'NAMI *"\.' ; done
(remove the -c for the self-evident file-listing)
On large directories with tens of thousands of files in them
(especially on spinning-rust HDDs rather than flash media), this
has a noticeable delay.
So it seems buggy that the performance of pkg_info depends on the
number of files in the current working directory. Especially since
pkg_info should almost certainly have no reason to be statting my
current directory.
-tkc
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