Working with large directories

[Rick Stevens]

On 03/16/2012 04:25 PM, fred smith wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 11:01:03PM +1030, Tim wrote:
>> On Thu, 2012-03-15 at 23:01 -0700, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
>>> Nautilus takes forever to list these directories and at times
>>> I just want to look for a particular file by string in the name.  Is
>>> there a fast graphic tool for this?  Then when I find the desired
>>> file, I typically open it in Firefox.
>>
>> Nautilus seems to sniff the files to discover their types, and a plug-in
>> tries to generate a thumbnail image for the file.  Both these features
>> are painfully slow with moderately largish directories.  You can turn
>> off the inclusion of the filetype in the list details, but not the image
>> generation.  Perhaps the plug-in could be manually replaced with
>> something which worked faster, or instantly "did nothing."
>>
>> I've used the emelFM2 file manager as an alternative, it doesn't show
>> thumbnails of files.  And it does let you do some wildcarding to
>> show/hide files in the lister gadget.
>
> I think it's most likely not that nautilus, etc., are slow in
> large directories, it is that large directories take a long time
> to search for files, making any action on those directories much
> slower than normal. A "problem" of long-standing on pretty much
> all Unix(-ish) file systems (and I'm not saying it won't happen on
> other systems, I don't really know, but suspect it does.)

Many file managers not only generate thumbs, stats and other things,
but if the directory is quite large there's a significant time spent
sorting the filenames into alphabetical order. For example, from the
command line go to a large directory and time the difference between
an "ls" and an "ls -f". It can be frightening (e.g. checking the
mail spool of a busy mail server).
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- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital    ricks at alldigital.com -
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