When I use my computer, one question I commonly want to answer for myself is "how much space is being used by the contents of this folder?". Typical file/window managers, IMX, answer this question the same way that Windows does: by recursing over directory contents and summing their logical sizes. This doesn't suit my needs, for three reasons:

• While the logical size of an individual file is interesting to me, a sum of logical sizes is not; I want a sum of physical sizes, because the question is about disk usage.

• It does the calculation (and directory traversal) on the fly, and doesn't show a progress bar or even a clear indication that it's done. Sometimes the file count and size sum will pause for seconds at a time and then start increasing again.

• It's very slow.

I know that I can use du at the command line to get physical sizes, and it's clear when du is finished because it outputs to the terminal and eventually returns to a terminal prompt. However, it doesn't solve the performance issue.

Is there a filesystem that natively caches this information about directories, or well-known software that maintains such a cache - so that if I e.g. check the size of /home/user, the size of /home/user/Desktop is already known and can be returned instantaneously (as long as the subfolder hasn't been modified in the mean time)? Similarly, caching the result for /home/user/Desktop should speed up a later check for /home/user, since it wouldn't have to consider the Desktop contents. It would also be nice to have a GUI for such a program.

I thought about making such a program, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel. I'd also be interested if there's any way to make ext4 filesystems cache this information automatically, even though they don't appear to by default.

posted 5 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Karl Knechtel‭

376 reputation 17 7 58 10