Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Oddly enough, trying to delete a few thousand PNG files is an efficient 
> way to lock Windows Explorer up for several seconds. 

Yes, just like that. :-) It makes Linux very unhappy too.

Oddly enough, I've had occasions in Vista where I move or delete a 
diretory, and it spends a huge amount of unnecessary time trawling thru 
a big complex directory structure, when presumedly it could just rename 
the directory itself and be done. As if it wants to count how many files 
are in there before it moves them as it would with a copy.

> And the deletion takes an anomolusly long time too... hmm.

Windows does some funky stuff with NTFS and deleting lots of files. It 
puts stuff in the journal that the file was deleted, but since the name 
of the file is actually an attribute of the file itself and not just the 
directory, you can't (for example) recreate the file after you deleted 
it but before the journal has actually been flushed to disk. Plus, 
apparently, there's no way to tell NTFS to flush the journal as fast as 
you can.

It might be something like this that makes Windows slow at deleting 
large numbers of files at once - you're waiting on a slow journal to flush.

I think on Linux it was just a combination of me picking a file system 
not really optimized for bunches of little files, combined with a 
journaling mode that's designed for utter safety rather than efficiency, 
combined with a software RAID. I probably could have improved it a bunch 
if I had an incentive to learn my options before installing things. :-)

>> Mind, they were full of several thousand gig of raided multimedia...
> I find the concept of "several thousand GB" intimidating. o_O

Try to avoid working with libraries of weeks-worth of uncompressed audio 
tracks.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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