More on Thunar vs Rodent read speeds

[Edscott Wilson Garcia]

Last night I dreamt Auke was telling me something about the directory
read routine used by Rodent, so I examined the code and found that it
was still legacy xffm-4.5.0 with extra Rodent demands. With Rodent
Beta-2 code I got 14 seconds for a cold cache reload of /usr/bin (2071
items).

Considering Danielle's figures:

> I've made a better test as suggested by Auke , rebooting after each
> trial (i could also  echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches ? ):
> 
> open /usr/bin, 2120 items, 266.7 mb:
> 
> Thunar: first read: ~18s
> 	second read: ~3.6s
> 
> Rodent: first read: ~24s
> 	second read: ~5.9s
> 

The equivalent of my 14 seconds on Danielle's box would be 10.5 seconds
for Thunar.

So I rethreaded operations in Rodent and brought the 14 seconds for a
cold cache reload of /usr/bin to less than one second. Thus, in the
forthcoming Rodent Beta-3 (aka xffm-4.6.6), Rodent will be 1000% faster
on first read, and 360% faster on second read for /usr/bin. These
figures are for a 4 core box. Single core boxes might not fare as well
(I'll try to do some tests later on).

Nonetheless, I still do not think stopwatch performance is what defines
a fast filemanager. Speed in Rodent is defined in reference to how fast
a user can get things done.

BTW, Rodent Beta-3 (aka xffm-4.6.6) is in the final refactoring stage
and release is coming soon.

-- 

cheers!

Edscott