on Rodent directory reading speed

[edscott wilson]

I'm editing the subject as the mailing list guidelines indicate. (sorry I
did not do that sooner)

Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2011 18:14:00 +0200
> From: Daniele Guerrieri <d.guerrieri at gmail.com>
>
>
> Hi,
> I've just built and installed Rodent beta-2 on my Fedora
> 15-hyperthreaded atom N450 acer netbook. It's very nice, but it takes
> ~26s to open /usr/bin while thunar takes only ~5s. (2217 items). Maybe
> something related to the atom CPU?
>

That is an operating system glitch. The first time you read the directory,
you really read the directory, while the second time, the operating system
has it all in memory cache and can determine that it is useless to do the
physical read again and will give you the cache data: much, much faster.
Rodent handles an additional stat cache which make a reload even faster. So
it all depends who got to go first.

Anyways, the length of time  any filemanager takes to read any large content
directory like /usr/bin is too much. An extra bonus of the "icon on folders"
feature (for  Beta-3, 4.6.6 release)   is that the operating system is told
in advance to cache the probable disk information the user might be needing.

Thus, on any empty OS cache clean start, Rodent will have a head start on
other filemanagers if the user gets to /usr by navigating to / first. Some
tweaks will be surely be necesary later on to optimize things.



> Howewer, i really like Rodent :)
>

Thank you. That is the reason Rodent is open source and available to
everybody: the expectation that it may be as useful to others as it is to me
:-)

regards,

Edscott
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