File picker is really slow on huge projects about helix HOT 4 CLOSED

Our transversal is currently not parallel because we sort entries alphabetically.

Windows has super slow IO. Anytime I see people having issues with IO speed like this it's Windows (if you are on WSL its even worse still) on Linux/macos it's never an issue for projects of practical size (I work on massive legacy codebases).

We can likely offer an option to disable the sorting and allow parallel transversal. It's not too useful since it's only a secondary tie breaker as soon as you enter a query.

Caching the filesystem does not make sense. For small directories it's not necessary and for large directories the memory consumption is prohibitive (you wouldn't want to cache $HOME or /).

And .ignore does prevent entering directories if a glob matches a directory

from helix.

Can you provide a simpler reproduction case - a different similarly large project?

The Linux kernel is often used when people need a huge project to test with.

I just tried untar'ing this tarball of 85,000 files and then opening hx in the directory:

https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/t/linux-6.10-rc2.tar.gz

It opened instantly. On Linux.

from helix.

The log isn't irrelevant, this line might be insightful:

Can you provide a simpler reproduction case - a different similarly large project? Cloning unreal engine is convoluted

from helix.

@liquidev One thing you can try is the new dev drive (built on top of ReFS) windows 11 comes with (you didn't specify windows version, so assuming 11). I've noticed various I/O improvements myself. Your milage may vary.

link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/

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