Performance Comparisons
thezealousfool opened this issue · comments
hunter claims to be "The fastest file manager in the galaxy!"; I (and I am sure many others) would like to see a proof of that.
nnn has a wiki page showing performance and comparisons with other similar applications. Something like that for hunter would be a nice addition.
PS: I am not saying I do not believe your claims. I love what you have done here. I can certainly use the application and build my opinions about it, but I feel a systematic and quantitative comparison of the claims will be really helpful.
On the dev branch it prints timing information and it shows that hunter currently loads 1 million files in < 200ms. nnn takes 1130ms to load that same directory as shown by time nnn. Even accounting for accuracy errors it still shows that hunter is a solid 4-5 times faster than nnn in the general case. That's with all data already in the kernel cache, so it only measures pure processing overhead. Uncached it's 650ms vs. 1950ms. Still well over twice as fast.
But the advantage grows even larger when browsing a slow HDD or network drive with high access latency. hunter tries really hard to draw as quickly as possible and only loads what is absolutely needed, so it will load a lot of metadata lazily when it becomes necessary to display file sizes and stuff like that as you scroll down. nnn will keep you waiting until it has everything, even if you only look at the first 50 files. A lot of file managers do this, but to me that that seemed unacceptable and quite low hanging fruit optimization wise.
I agree that having a proper, reproducible benchmark would be nice to have. But since nnn is the thing to beat there is little point in testing aynthing else (there's nothing faster I'm aware of). So unless you can point out a faster file manager than nnn I think it's safe to say hunter is the fastest there is.