On Thu, 21 Jun 2001 at 13:25:17 +1000, Craig Sanders wrote: > On Thu, Jun 21, 2001 at 01:45:23AM +0800, Jason Lim wrote: > > SO... by increasing conf-split to 97 (from the default of 20 > > something afaik), each directory ends up only having a hundred or so > > files. Doing "ls" now is far speedier. > > [...] > > this is actually a well-known limitation of ext2fs and similar > file-systems - as soon as you get more than a thousand or so files in a > directory, performance takes a nosedive. >
BTW, a tip: if you've got "ls" aliased (for instance as 'ls --color=auto -F') then you can shorten this long execution of "ls". Just issue "/bin/ls" instead of "ls". The difference is very big. It can be as 1:200 (yeah!). I've just done a comparison in a directory with > 33000 files. "/bin/ls | wc" has taken 1 (one) second. "ls | wc" lasted 3 minutes and 26 seconds. Yes, near 3 and a half minutes! This is because "ls" with additional information (e.g. file type, which is needed to colour a listing) needs more time to gather this information. I don't know what difference would be for reiserfs or xfs filesystems. Hope it helps a little :-) . -- Tomasz Papszun SysAdm @ TP S.A. Lodz, Poland | And it's only [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.lodz.tpsa.pl/ | ones and zeros.