Is sequential IO dead in the era of the NVMe drive?

Re:Is sequential IO dead in the era of the NVMe drive? by NovaDudely on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @03:24AM (#35884677)

It was Nautilus file manager in Ubuntu that used to drag if you opened a folder with a few thousand files. It was it was essentially doing at least one request for each file when you opened a folder and this was limited by the spin rate of the HDD. So if you had 5,400 files and a 5400RPM drive, yep that would take a full minute to resolve.

Eventually the solution really just become - get an SSD because you could throw thousand of requests and the results was fast enough.

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Re:Is sequential IO dead in the era of the NVMe drive? by vistu on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @04:10AM (#35884945)

While I do not doubt that Nautilus did that, I don't think it's a given that a 5400 RPM drive will take exactly a minute to scan through 5400 files.

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Re:Is sequential IO dead in the era of the NVMe drive? by geraldhh on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @04:31AM (#35885075)

a sensible conclusion

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Re:Is sequential IO dead in the era of the NVMe drive? by NovaDudely on Thursday May 11, 2023 @09:24PM (#35910703)

I should not have said that so literally but it was more an example of how the physical driver can limit these things.

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Re:Is sequential IO dead in the era of the NVMe drive? by opan on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @11:34AM (#35888889)

You'll still find that the gtk file managers choke hard when you have hundreds of thousands of files in one directory (such as screenshots), taking minutes to load or even hanging and crashing. Both pcmanfm-qt and dolphin handle them fine and load within 30 seconds. I last tested this a year or two ago and every gtk file manager was roughly equally bad. Made me switch from pcmanfm to pcmanfm-qt (I didn't like dolphin as much).

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