Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!nrl-cmf!ukma!simon
From: simon@ms.uky.edu (Simon Gales)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Large number of files slows machine.
Message-ID: <10723@s.ms.uky.edu>
Date: 21 Dec 88 00:05:50 GMT
References: <8545@j.cc.purdue.edu> <7192@chinet.chi.il.us> <1078@pilchuck.Data-IO.COM>
Reply-To: simon@ms.uky.edu (Simon Gales)
Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences
Lines: 23

In article <8545@j.cc.purdue.edu> tim@j.cc.purdue.edu (Timothy Lange) writes:
>I am dealing with an user that has around 650 files in a subdirectory.
>We noticed that accessing the files at the bottom of the DIR listing
>is much slower than the files near the beginning.  The performance
>really drops off at about the 512th file.

Using norton's SD to de-fragment your disk mmay help, but that probably
isn't the problem.  DOS is having to search through a _lot_ of files
to find the one it wants to open.  If the directory is in your path,
it should at least be the last one.

If you aren't accessing all the files often, sort the directory so that
the files you access most are at the beginning (with norton's ds).

Try using FASTOPEN to cache your directory entries, make sure you make
the cache size as big as your directory  (FASTOPEN c=700).

Best of all, try splitting the directory into two or more directories.

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