Anything faster than 'du' ?

[Michael Hipp]

C M Reinehr wrote:
> On Tuesday 03 July 2007 14:17, Michael Hipp wrote:
>> 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
>>
> 
> If archive is a separate, mounted file system you could use df.

Thanks. I'm usually needing to know the sizes of those individual client 
folders inside archive.

Michael