Mildred wrote: > Hi, > > I noticed that du takes a long time to scan directories and measure > disk usage. > > I was thinking that perhaps caching the size of directories could bu > useful. Perhaps, after du computes the size of a directory, it could > write its size in its extended attributes (if the filesystem support > it). Next time, du would only compare the directory atime (or mtime > perhaps) with the time of the scan. That could possibly save some time > during the scan.
Those values would be invalidated though once a change has been written anywhere in the tree under a directory. > Perhaps this is not something to be included in du itself, but I > thought it could be a good idea to give the idea anyway. The idea might be appropriate on a per file basis. For example, md5sum which needs to do significant processing on all of a file's data, could cache the computed value in an extended attribute. You would need support in the filesystem though, to invalidate certain extended attributes on write. Pádraig. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
