Why are File Searches So SLOW?
By
Staten Island, NY Posted: 1/28/2017 1:00:00 AM
Why does it take so long to find a file... even when you know the name?
I'm a database guy, so it drives me crazy when it takes as much as 5 or 10 minutes to search for a file name on my computers. That's because most computers these days can have as many as a million or more files, and there is no real database storing all the filenames.
Because there's no built-in, always on database of filename, whenever you search for a file, the operating system needs to literally scan through each and every directory to find the file you're looking for. That's pretty crazy, considering how much larger today's hard drives are getting.
By contrast, if filenames were stored in a REAL database like SQL Server, you would be able to find any filename in a fraction of a second, even if there were hundreds of millions of files.
Joe Crescenzi, Founder
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