Altap Salamander Support Forums

Hey,
I was searching for "bin" folders inside my extensive "Program Files" node, by using "Advanced Options: Attributes: +D" in Find dialog. I didn't know that I can do search look-up based only on folder name so I was happy when I saw it as option
However search took some time, which led me to try and see what "brute force" would produce:

dir /ad /s /b | findstr /eli "\bin"

took 3:52

salamander "bin" lookup with "Advanced Options: Attributes: +D" took 4:28

I think this shouldn't be this way, so thought to drop by and ask the experts why could this be

Is it possible the command line test was performed after Altap Salamander? In such case file system was cached computer memory.
Did you try to run Altap Salamander test twice?

What Windows version is it? I assume latest AS 2.54?

Jan Rysavy wrote:Is it possible the command line test was performed after Altap Salamander? In such case file system was cached computer memory.

Yes it was from cmd prompt launched inside AS after the first search with Find dialog - should that matter, because I used DIR listing command?

Jan Rysavy wrote:Did you try to run Altap Salamander test twice?

Yes I did, but I first exited AS then tried the second test

Jan Rysavy wrote:What Windows version is it? I assume latest AS 2.54?

It's latest AS on Win 7 U 32b

I run again the same test: Exit AS, run cmd then

dir /ad /s /b | findstr /eli "\lib"

It took 3:38. I start AS and search for "lib" with attr. +D, it took ~ 4:30. Do the search again for another pattern in same dialog, it took 20s

You're talking a 4 minute search there? That must be really extensive!

Appears if it is extensive enough, caching may not be much of a factor.
Only my lowly XP system, searching my C: partition (18 GB) for 'bin'

Appears that if there is not enough available memory to properly (fully) cache a search, search times can be (& remain) extensive.

A number of times in succession, searching C: for 'bin' took around 30 seconds.
After say the 5th consecutive run, that dropped to about 2 seconds.

What I'm sure happened, is that initially my browser was using most of my physical (448 MB) memory.
After a number of DIR runs, (much of the) physical browser memory paged out to virtual memory.
And it must have been at that point where the DIR searches dropped from 30 to 2 seconds.


(Now with Everything search engine you Locate files and folders by name instantly.)

I know about popular Everything, it indexes everything and it's really fast, but I guess that's for users that do a lot of search on daily bases. And it is usefull tool. For the record my Program Files has ~63 GB, 47 K folders, and 490 K files