> > What's the bottle neck here? > > Looking up the filenames and reading them, printing them to standard > out and then wc parsing for all the \n characters.
None of the time comes from wc. Changing from ' | wc -l' to '> /dev/null' creates no speedup at all. ls's bottlenecks come almost entirely from 'lstat and sorting'. After some trivial changes to sbase ls, we see the following: # time /bin/ls | wc -l 731634 real 1m14.849s user 0m0.987s sys 0m4.355s # time /bin/ls -f | wc -l 731636 real 0m18.203s user 0m0.376s sys 0m3.310s # time /sbase/bin/ls | wc -l 731634 real 0m0.854s user 0m0.585s sys 0m0.275s # time /sbase/bin/ls -f | wc -l 731634 real 0m0.365s user 0m0.102s sys 0m0.271s Another change to prevent ls from sponging all the filenames into ram when not sorting should bring that down to about 0.1s real.
