[vdr] Re: timer sorting

[Emil Naepflein <Emil.Naepflein@philosys.de>]

On 28 Mar 2002 22:45:00 +0200, Usenet-372203@zocki.toppoint.de (Rainer
Zocholl) wrote:

> I have only 50GB on a 60GB Samsung and the time between pressing
> "4 recordings" and the directory listing took almost 6 sec!
> (Debian with 2.4.17 from kernel.org, Debian-ext3, 128MB DRAM, 1000MHz)

I use Suse 2.4.10 and ReiserFS, 256MB and 700 MHz Duron. I have found
out that in my setup 128MB wasn't enough. It takes about 2-3 seconds for
about 300 directories if everything has been flushed out of memory.

> May be some "mean" tricks are required?
> 
> - Do not search for more directories, that are actually
> possible to be displayed (but continue in the back ground...)
> 
> - Do not recurse for files as long as no directory is selected/displayed
> 
> But such tricks are only required if there were ten thounds of
> files. But there are far less than 50 files (IMHO), and it is always so slow.

Its because everything has been flushed out of memory and has to be read
from disk again.

> 
> 
> Still i think the problem is originated by the mkfs tool.
> On such a "big" disk, mkfs seems to reserve Zillions of filename 
> entries, and Zillions of never needed inodes too.

I don't think that this is a problem because everything works fast if
the disk blocks are cached in memory.

> 
> 
> 
> >You may loose all your recordings.
> 
> But then it'll become faster, right? ;-)

Look for the optimization of Axel. He writes the output of the find
command regularily to a file and uses the file content directly.

I have exchanged find against ls and had good results.

Be careful, Axel lost all his recordings. 

Emil