I have noticed that performing commands such as ls ( even with -U ) and
du in a Maildir with many thousands of small files takes ages to
complete. I have investigated and believe this is due to the order in
which the files are stat()ed. I believe that these utilities are simply
stat()ing the files in the order that they are returned by readdir(),
and this causes a lot of random disk reads to fetch the inodes from disk
out of order.
My initial testing indicates that sorting the files into inode order and
calling stat() on them in order is around an order of magnitude faster,
so I would suggest that utilities be modified to behave this way.
Questions/comments?
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