Wiennat

Todya, I have to copy all fonts in my computer to my flash drive for my friends. I dragged my fonts directory to my flash drive directly without thinking anything. I surfed the internet for more than 10 mins, and then went back to the copying dialog to check the progress. It showed only 10% completed so I realized something I’d missed.

Fonts directory contains a lot of small files. Directory that is controlled by SVN is same. It has a lot of meta data in form of many small files. Copying many small files is slower than one large file dramatically. Because of file system, copying one file causes at least one modification in file system. That’s mean thousands of file cause thousands of modification and this is the root of slowness.

So I clicked the cancel button, zipped the files together, copied it to my flash drive and it completed in 30 secs.

But I have to wait for another 5 mins. to delete all files I’d copied to my flash drive.

In conclusion, if you have to transfer many small files, zip it. Repeat, zip it. Period.