Working with large directories

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, 2012-03-16 at 19:25 -0400, 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.)

If that were so, 'ls' would take as long as Nautilus (or Dolphin or
whatever) to list a large directory. I don't have any huge directories
to test, but I'm sceptical.

poc