Peter said:
Yes that makes complete sense, so it is quite reasonable
that copying folders of 200,000 small files takes
fifteen-fold longer than copying the same amount of data
comprised of 100 very large files.
Do you know why deleting many small files could take a much
more unreasonable amount of time on Windows XP x64?
At the rate the deletion was going it would have taken 20
hours to delete about 200,000 files. I ended up reformatting
the drive and reloading the data, this took much less time.
I haven't a clue. I don't know if there is any way, short of
using some kind of development environment debugger, to
find out what is going on.
Some problems are obvious ones. There was an SIS chipset and
driver, where when you clicked on an icon, there was no
response from the computer for five seconds, and then the
operation would start. In that case, it seemed the
first file operation would fail (no response), time out,
and get retried. At least that has obvious visible symptoms.
(Nice consistent 5 second delay, no CPU utilization to speak of
until the five seconds is up.) But for more subtle cases
(like yours - only being able to delete 3 files per second),
it could be something hidden, like antivirus software activity.
Sysinternals.com has some tools for watching what is going on,
but if there were issues at a driver level, I don't know if
you'd see anything incriminating or not. I cannot play with
just any Sysinternals tool on my computer here, because my
antivirus software (Kaspersky) gets into a fight with some of
the programs, resulting in a computer freeze that not even
control-alt-delete can fix. (Control-alt-delete is "hooked" by
the AV software, and if the AV is "busy", then control-alt-delete
stops working. Talk about invasive.)
Paul
