On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 03:21:47PM -0400, Caleb Epstein wrote:
Beman, is this on your radar screen at all? I last tried to ping you about it in March.
To refresh, Boost.Filesystem seems to use the POSIX pathconf call excessively, which hurts performance when doing recursive operations like UNIX's find(1) command.
Performance has been a problem with Boost::Filesystem for at least a year. Back when I mentioned it, the "party line" :-) was that the API was top priority and performance would be something that could be looked at later. With the standards committees looking at including Boost::Filesystem in TR2, I think performance is imporant enough to be looked at by now. You can read some early testing from June 2005 here: http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2005/06/87696.php Using POSIX calls or native directory calls isn't that hard, and people can code this themselves with greater speed than Boost::Filesystem. I know that I did this for my application, which I think is unfortunate, since a fast, cross-platform filesystem API would be useful, especially in the standard. But it loses its utility when it can't keep up with find(1). - Chris