Anything faster than 'du' ?

[Michael Hipp]

David Bandel wrote:
> On 7/2/07, Bill Campbell <linux-sxs at celestial.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 02, 2007, Michael Hipp wrote:
>>> Is there a faster way to determine the size of a deep directory of files
>>> rather than using 'du'?  It (du) is really painful if there are lots of
>>> files or the medium is slow like USB?
>> Anything that has to scan an entire directory structure, and stat()
>> all the entries to get the sizes is going to take a fair amount
>> of time.  I haven't looked at the code for ``du'', but I would
>> have to guess that it's pretty lean.
>>
> 
> Bill's right.  This is a _very_ mature program.  Most of the time it
> takes to run through the directory structures, though, has more to do
> with screen display speed than du doing its job.  If you don't believe
> me, redirect output to a file (/dev/null is a good test) and watch how
> fast you get a prompt.

Well, I was just wondering if there was a tool that had some trick for 
determining sizes of a deep directory rather than the "brute force" 
method of du.

And the problem I'm having isn't related to the screen. Here's a typical 
output:

# du -h --max-depth=1 archive
16K     archive/lost+found
51G     archive/church
11G     archive/rhodes
154G    archive/garreco
3.3G    archive/dorcas
4.0K    archive/michael
4.0K    archive/test
65G     archive/esther
35G     archive/cornerstone
21G     archive/distcourt
339G    archive

There's probably close to a million files represented there but it 
doesn't take long for the screen to scroll a dozen lines.

Thanks. Guess I'll just have to be patient. :-)

Naw.

Michael