12 ms·
On Windows I always used to use Windirstat but it was slow, then I found Wiztree which is many orders of magnitude faster. I understand it works by directly rea
by Neil44 2y ago
On Windows I always used to use Windirstat but it was slow, then I found Wiztree which is many orders of magnitude faster. I understand it works by directly reading the NTFS tables rather than spidering through the directories laboriously. I wonder if this approach would work for ext4 or whatever.
- utensil4778 2y ago> it works by directly reading the NTFS tables rather than spidering through the directories Maybe I'm just ignorant of linux filesystems, but this seems like the obvious thing to do. Do ext and friends not have a file table like this?
- Filligree 2y agoNTFS is pointlessly slow, so bypassing the VFS provides a decent speedup in exchange for the ridiculous fragility. Linux doesn’t have the same issue, and I’d be quite concerned if an application like this needed root access to function.
- ablob 2y agoI want to take this opportunity to recommend the talk "NTFS isn't that bad" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbKGw8MQ0i8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbKGw8MQ0i8). NTFS prefers a different access pattern than most usual file systems. I remember that a part of the talk was about speed-ups on Linux as well. So even if it doesn't sway your opinion it should enhance your perspective on how file systems work.
- p_l 2y agoThe issue usually isn't NTFS, but the other layers in the I/O stack. NTFS-the-on-disk-structure by itself can easily provide setup comparable to XFS realtime extensions.
- luma 2y agoI think you underestimate how much of a speedup we're talking about: it can pull in the entire filesystem in a couple seconds on a multi TB volume with Bs of files. I have yet to see anything in the linux world (including the OP) that comes anywhere near this performance level via tree walking.
- Gormo 2y agoIf you do like WinDirStat, there's a good Linux equivalent called QDirStat: https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat
- fsfod 2y agoThere is a fork of Windirstat that also reads the NTFS MFT as well https://github.com/ariccio/altWinDirStat https://github.com/ariccio/altWinDirStat