Re: A tale of waiting

[Dirk-Jan Binnema <djcb bulk gmail com>]

2009/6/26 Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>

On Fri, 2009-06-26 at 10:25 +0200, Jernej Simončič wrote:
>> On Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:12:05 +0200, Kristian Rietveld wrote:
>>
>> I don't know about Linux, but on Windows the native chooser displays large
>> directories almost instantly, while the GTK+ one is very slow (eg.
>> directory with 970 images takes about 2 seconds to display in the native
>> file chooser, while in GTK+'s it takes 12 seconds).

> Except that the Windows explorer actually has knowledge of the
> filesystem itself. This was mentioned and discussed with Darin Adler
> (very many years ago, as he mentioned he got that information from the
> BeFS developer (Italian lad, whose name escapes me right now)).

For a little fs-specific trick on Linux: If you actually have to *open* the files (e.g, for sniffing), you can make things quite a bit faster by sorting the files in order of inode first, if you are on ext3 (and ext4 I suppose, as well as other hashed-b-tree supporting file systems). I got around 40% improvement.

On file systems that don't support it, the overhead seems negligible. 
For some details: http://djcbflux.blogspot.com/2008/10/seek-destroy.html

Best wishes,
Dirk.