Subject: Re: bug#44273: "total used in directory 19 available 5.2 GiB"

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2020 17:34:54 +0200

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]>
> Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2020 12:23:22 +0100
> Cc: 積丹尼 Dan Jacobson <[email-masked]>,
>  [email-masked]
> 
> Mattias Engdegård <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> > Definitely, and if it is faster to fork another process and parse its
> > output with slow regexps in Emacs to do the job of what ordinarily
> > just takes a few syscalls, then we aren't doing our job properly. It's
> > not hard to read directories efficiently.
> 
> True.  If `ls-lisp' (or something similar) isn't fast enough, then it
> should be pretty easy to add a C-level function for efficient directory
> reading.

Are you sure it's reading the directory that takes the lion's share of
the time?  Maybe it's inserting the file information, one file at a
time, into a buffer?  Or something else?

That's why I suggested to profile and benchmark this thing.

>  (But we'd still need the parser for Tramp.)

Tramp could always use what it does now, or use ls-lisp, or something
else.