From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2008-01-12T07:25:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Counting the files in a directory....

On 11.01.2008 19:14, Kyle Schmitt wrote:
> Entries seems to be fairly identical to collect, and it does look nicer...
> but yea still slow.

As I said: it's the IO for crowded directories (see also Mike's reply).

> The problem with caching is that we only keep quarantine directories
> around for 10 days, due to their size and the relative rarity of us
> needing to pull something out of it.  One reason for writing this as a
> script is that we recover rarely enough that whoever is doing it
> forgot how to recover.  Still, it's often enough that we want to be
> able to do it easily.
> 
> In other cases than a mail system, caching would be a very good idea though.

I am not sure I understand why you think it is a bad idea.  If you only 
cache the number of files per directory where is the issue?  Or is this 
script not invoked regularly?  Probably I am missing a bit of your use case.

> I'll try and read more of the C stuff for handling files/directories
> in unix.  I can hold out hope for awhile.

Won't help.  It's really the size of the directory.  Maybe you give a 
little more detail about your script and when it's used so we can come 
up with better suggestions.

Cheers

	robert