Re: [boost] [filesystem] Some questions about string use

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-04-29 16:28:39

"Chris Frey" <cdfrey_at_[hidden]> wrote in message 
news:20060429021716.GA26100_at_foursquare.net...
> On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 03:21:47PM -0400, Caleb Epstein wrote:
>> Beman, is this on your radar screen at all?  I last tried to ping you 
>> about
>> it in March.
>>
>> To refresh, Boost.Filesystem seems to use the POSIX pathconf call
>> excessively, which hurts performance when doing recursive operations like
>> UNIX's find(1) command.
>
> Performance has been a problem with Boost::Filesystem for at least a year.
> Back when I mentioned it, the "party line" :-) was that the API was top 
> priority
> and performance would be something that could be looked at later.
>
> With the standards committees looking at including Boost::Filesystem
> in TR2, I think performance is imporant enough to be looked at by now.

AFAIK, all performance issues have been resolved. The pathconf issues was 
only resolved recently, but the need for directory iteration to cache status 
was fixed quite a while ago, as were interface changes so that several 
status queries regarding the same file don't result in disk accesses unless 
so desired.

So you may want to checkout the current CVS head to see if whatever 
performance problem you were seeing is still an issue.

Part of the problem may be that the current Boost release process is so 
lengthy that changes made to CVS last Fall still haven't appeared in an 
official Boost release. I've got a proposal about ready to address that 
problem, and will post something in 10 days or so.

--Beman