Winter of Code (Part 2)

Let me focus in this post on one of the big motivators to write a file explorer: speed. I find it appalling that explorer sometime just 'hangs' for several seconds at a time when browsing folders with a lot of items. For example I have a folder that has 6000 folders inside, if by mistake I open it with explorer it hoses my machine for several seconds.

Here is the CPU usage when I do this, even after explorer has cached the folder contents, the graph goes from 0 to 100% CPU use:


Each tick mark is about 5 seconds, so I count about 30 seconds with the CPU clamped, where I don't even get the hourglass pointer. What is it doing? well, I guess a lot of useful things to somebody out there but to me this is not the case.

I am glad the 6000 folders do not contain pictures because it would take a very long time while explorer opens each folder finds a few images reads them, re-sizes them and composes them into these cute (but to me useless) folders:

Do you know what I mean? it tries to be a help to people that have pictures, but if you really have a lots of pictures you better not use explorer.

I have lots of files, and I want something that does less but better.