On Sat, Jan 14, 2023 at 11:42:58AM +1100, Eliot Moss via Cygwin wrote: > Dear Cygwin'ers - > > I have a separate drive mounted this way: > > d:/ /cygdrive/d ntfs binary,posix=0,user,noacl,auto 0 0 > > One thing I use it for is to store backup files. These tend to be 2 Gb > chunks, and there can be hundreds of them in the backup directory. (The drive > is 5Tb.) The Windows Disk Management tool describes it as NTFS, Basic Data > Partition. > > Doing ls (for example) takes a very perceptible numbers of seconds (though > whatever takes a long time seems to be cached, at least for a while, since a > second ls soon after is fast). > > Windows Explorer (for example) and CMD do not seem to suffer this delay. > > Any notion as to what is happening and what I might do to ameliorate it? > > If it matters, the drive is removable (an external WD MyPassport hard drive).
I *suspect* this will be an issue with `ls` querying some file metadata that are relatively slow to get out of an NTFS system, to provide a similar interface to native *nix systems, where Windows' tools unsurprisigly care more about the sorts of file properties that Windows filesystems are better optimised for. Based on experience, you might find using `ls --color=never` to be quicker: querying some of the properties that `ls` likes to use for colouring the output seems to require a bunch of extra queries to the filesystem. Failing that, if you have control over the directory layout, making the structure deeper with fewer objects in each directory will probably help. -- Problem reports: https://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: https://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: https://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: https://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
