Filelight Speed on Windows
As of a couple days ago Filelight on Windows is performing its search many times faster than before. Go check it out!
https://apps.kde.org/filelight/
It’s shocking that it was slow to begin with… A few years ago I rewrote the Filelight file walking logic to use native API for Linux and Windows. I thought I did a pretty good job of it and speed wasn’t too shabby. You can imagine my surprise when a friend recently pointed out that a similar piece of software performed maybe even better. Obviously this couldn’t stand. I immediately went to profile the situation and indeed Filelight wasn’t as fast as expected.
It turns out there are multiple competing APIs for querying file information on Windows and depending on which gets used performance may not be what you would expect. There’s a good write-up at https://www.cppstories.com/2024/cpp-query-file-attribs-faster/ in case you care to read more.
Long story short: by not calling slow API, Filelight is now heaps faster than before. Scans that took multiple seconds before now finish in the blink of an eye.
In case you are wondering just how much faster it is:
New
Old
Enjoy!