this program seems to have the same issues with it.

Thanks
Mark


----- Original Message ----- From: "cpghost" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Bill Moran" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: "Wojciech Puchar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Mark Evans" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2007 8:42 AM
Subject: Re: ls -l takes a forever to finish.


On Thu, 29 Nov 2007 08:42:44 -0500
Bill Moran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

In response to Wojciech Puchar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:

> > ls | wc
>
> strange. i did
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~/b]$ a=0;while [ $a -lt 10000 ];do mkdir
> $a;a=$[a+1];done
>
> completed <25 seconds on 1Ghz CPU
>
> ls takes 0.1 seconds user time, ls -l takes 0.3 second user time.
>
> unless you have 486/33 or slower system there is something wrong.

Another possible scenario is that the directory is badly fragmented.
Unless something has changed since I last researched this (which is
possible) FreeBSD doesn't manage directory fragmentation during use.
If you're constantly adding and removing files, it's possible that
the directory entry is such a mess that it takes ls a long time to
process it.

Yes, that's also possible. But sorting is really the culprit here:
it *is* possible to create a directory with filenames in such a way
that it triggers Quicksort's O(N^2) worst case instead of O(N log N).

The following Python (2.5) program calls "ls -lf" and sorts its output
with Python's own stable sort() routine (which is NOT qsort(3)). On a
directory with 44,000 entries, it runs orders of magnitude faster than
"ls -l", even though it has to use the decorate-sort-undecorate idiom
to sort the output according according the filename, and it is
interpreted rather than compiled!

I guess that replacing qsort(3) in
/usr/src/lib/libc/gen/fts.c:fts_sort()
with another sort algorithm which doesn't
expose this anomaly would solve that problem.

--------------------- cut here ------------------ cut here ------------

#!/usr/bin/env python
# sortls.py -- sort output of ls -lf with python's stable sort routine.

import os

def sort_ls_lf(path):
   "Sort the output of ls -lf path"
   os.chdir(path)
   lines = os.popen("ls -lf", "r").readlines()
   dsu = [ (line.split()[-1], line) for line in lines ]
   dsu.sort()
   return ''.join(tupl[1] for tupl in dsu)

if __name__ == '__main__':
   import sys
   if len(sys.argv) < 2:
       print >>sys.stderr, "Usage:", sys.argv[0], "path"
       sys.exit(1)
   path = sys.argv[1]

   try:
       print sort_ls_lf(path)
   except IOError:
       pass   # silently absorb broken pipe and other errors

--------------------- cut here ------------------ cut here ------------

Regards,
-cpghost.

--
Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/
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