Archive for the ‘WTFs’ Category
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Boosting Windows 7 File Move Performance by Up to 10,000%
I’m currently moving about a whole bunch of smaller files in Windows 7 (about 400,000 files). I was getting frustrated with the abysmal rate at which Windows is able to move files around. Even moving just one folder into another one causes Explorer to start “discovering” the entire source dir, which is utterly pointless in the first place as there’s just one node to consider and to relink in the MFT. One wonders why it always does that. It didn’t do so before Vista.
Anyway – adding injury to insult, these files need to be imported in and processed by an application which is rather poorly written, making it run out of memory when it is fed much more than 4,000 files at a time. So, I have to move batches of about 4,000 files into separate folders before importing them, and to do this I have to use Explorer. The move operations, as mentioned, are incredibly slow, maxing out at 25 items per second, sometimes dropping to 5 items/sec, generally hovering at about 15 items/sec. I was wondering if the problem was the files lists in the source and target Explorer windows being continually refreshed as items were moved in and out of them, and so tried to navigate away from them, even closing the windows entire, without effect.
Then, by accident, I discovered that if I selected a batch of files from the bottom of the list in the source window, the move operation was massively faster, running at 350-500 items/sec! That’s a performance factor of ~ 14 to 100, in other performing, compared to the previous runs, at between 1,400% and 10,000% effectiveness. Go figure!
Not having access to the Windows source code, one can only guess at what kind of code disaster lies behind this behavior. But regardless, remembering this trick can prove very helpful when you don’t feel like spending an entire day looking a green bars very slowly moving east.
These issues, and the effect of this trick, seem to happen according to Windows’ current mood, though. Sometimes you get to drag-and-drop a folder with 200,000 files into another folder instantly, at other times it’ll spend 30 seconds examing a 100-file folder. Similarly, sometimes (about 1 in 4 so far) the forementioned trick has no effect, and you’re looking at green bars again. Your mileage may vary
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Is this 2000 Once Again?
Sitting here reading feeds. Two consecutive posts from TechCrunch:
One is about real value, real innovation where investments will generate real return, where the other is pop piggy-backing on services piggy-backing on trends with a monolithic trend beacon still not generating revenue. Yet the pig is snubbing out $6 billion?
Are we already knee-deep in the next IT bubble waiting to burst as a horrid aftershock to the economic crisis a few years back? There’s so much money being funneled into non-revenue generating business these days… These months… These years…
Just me?
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The PHP Approach to Handling Race Conditions
Well, I know this isn’t thedailywtf, but coming across this WTF, I just had to share it. Apparently, if you want to know the value of the auto_increment field value from your latest MySQL INSERT statement, you have to make sure you ask for it really quickly,
“Note: Because mysql_insert_id() acts on the last performed query, be sure to call mysql_insert_id() immediately after the query that generates the value.”
Well, I guess that’s one way to avoid a possible race condition… If you’re retarded
Recent Posts
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- Boosting Windows 7 File Move Performance by Up to 10,000%
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- Linux Users More Generous than their Paying Mac and Windows Counterparts?
