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From: gchamby@cs-col.Columbia.NCR.COM (Greg Chamby)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Subject: Help with large # files in dir
Keywords: Copy, XCOPY, Buffers, directory
Message-ID: <1990Aug19.012037.18164@cs-col.Columbia.NCR.COM>
Date: 19 Aug 90 01:20:37 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: NCR Corporate Customer Services, E&M Columbia
Lines: 29


	I recently had a Novell file server drive become corrupted and had
to send it off for repair. The drive was returned as an MSDOS drive using
Disk Manager partitioning software. One subdirectory on this drive had
almost 13,000 files in it (yes, thirteen thousand). The problem with it was
in copying all those files off the DOS drive to another Novell file server
drive. I used Novell's NCOPY command which is basically just a straight
copier of files for networks. As far as I know the only difference between
it and DOS copy is that NCOPY will handle subdirectories and preserves
Network file attributes.
	The copy took about 2.5 days due to DOS choking on the large
number of files in the subdir. Towards the end it was copying about two
files a minute. I could watch it copy a file, scan the disk for about 30
secs and then get the next file. Is this an inherent problem with MSDOS?
I've seen a DIR command steadily degrade after a couple thousand files as
well. Is DOS doing a linear search to get the next dir entry? I'm
wondering if there is anything one can do to speed up DOS when accessing a
huge number of files such as this. I don't believe upping the BUFFERS
would help since we're talking about a sequential copy of files. Also,
people kept asking me why I didn't use XCOPY but I can't think of a case
where XCOPY would be faster than COPY when copying files sequentially from
one hard drive to another. On a one floppy system, XCOPY is nice but
otherwise I think it would just waste time filling memory. Can anyone out
there comment on all this? Any info would be appreciated. Thanks.

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{gchamby%cs-col                                                         }
{ or  ncrcae!cs-col!gchamby                                             }
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