Hi All-- Rowdy wrote: > > FreeDB (CD database) stores one file per CD in one directory per > category. The "misc" category/directory on my FreeBSD 5.3 system > currently contains around 481,571 small files. The "rock" > directory/category contains 449,208 files. > > As some have said, ls is *very* slow on these directories, but otherwise > there don't seem to be any problems. >
I assume you're all using Linux. The GNU version of ls does two things that slow it down. The System V and BSD versions were pretty much identical, in that they processed the argv array in whatever order the shell passed it in. The GNU version re-orders the argv array and stuffs all the arguments into a queue. No big deal if you're just doing ls, but for ls <multiple directory names> it can slow it down for large argv[n] and/or recursive/deep ls. The other thing it does different from SysV/BSD ls is that it provides for default options in an environment variable. If those env settings specify to always use color, that will slow directory processing _way_ down, identically to the -F option. That's because the color and -F options _require_ a stat() on each and every file in the directory. Standard ls with no options (or old SysV/BSD ls that came with no options) works nearly as fast as os.listdir() in Python, because it doesn't require a stat(). The only thing faster, from a shell user's viewpoint, is 'echo *'. That may not be much help;-) Metta, Ivan ---------------------------------------------- Ivan Van Laningham God N Locomotive Works http://www.andi-holmes.com/ http://www.foretec.com/python/workshops/1998-11/proceedings.html Army Signal Corps: Cu Chi, Class of '70 Author: Teach Yourself Python in 24 Hours -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
