Quote:
Originally Posted by
Michael Stora
Even a 2-3x improvement would help tramendously.
Computers do not work that way.
A slow system call is slow in any language, and the slower it is, the less there is to be gained by 'optimizing' it.
Suppose your program is spending 98% of its time waiting for NFS and 2% of its time actually running. If you find a 200% faster proram, it will be spending 1% of its time actually running and 99% of its time waiting on NFS with theoretical a speed gain of 1% and a realistic speed gain of absolutely zip.
This is also why you can't turbo charge a slow disk with a fast program. No matter how fast your program is, the underlying I/O can't actually move faster.
You might be able to parallelize it, but only to a point.
Perhaps your network connection or NFS can be fine-tuned? That's beyond my expertise, though.
P.S. The find command is not 'known to be slow', certainly not slower than any other file tree walker I know. If you don't understand why it's 'slow' when used on huge file trees, you don't actually know what it's doing.