Re^3: Efficient processing of large directory

[Aristotle]

You should readdir instead. Also, if this is running from a CGI (I guess that's what timing out is referring to), then make sure to give the client a few bytes of data every now and then so it doesn't give up waiting.

[Elliott]

Now I know that readdir exists (thanks Aristotle!) I was able to RTFM and put it into practice. Those functions that do not require me to open the files have improved stunningly. So much so that the client rang me at home to thank me and backed it up with an email full of exclamation marks.

Now I have to further improve the processes that have to read all the files. But I guess that's another thread!

[BrowserUk]

readdir is less efficient than glob if a subset of the directory contents is sought.

[Aristotle]

Apart from the fact that the OP isn't looking for a subset.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Benchmark qw /cmpthese/;

chdir shift or die;

cmpthese -5 => {
        glob => sub {
                1 while glob '*';
        },
        readdir => sub {
                opendir my $dh, '.' or die;
                1 while readdir $dh;
        },
};
__END__

$ mkdir x ; cd x ; touch `seq 1 20000` ; cd ..
$ perl glob_vs_readdir.pl x
Benchmark: running glob, readdir for at least 5 CPU seconds...
   glob:  6 wallclock secs ( 4.02 usr +  1.07 sys =  5.09 CPU) @  5.30
+/s (n=27)
readdir:  6 wallclock secs ( 3.93 usr +  1.37 sys =  5.30 CPU) @ 65.28
+/s (n=346)
          Rate    glob readdir
glob    5.30/s      --    -92%
readdir 65.3/s   1131%      --