[Info-vax] improve performance of /EXCLUDE

[mcleanjoh at gmail.com]

On Wednesday, January 28, 2015 at 10:57:32 AM UTC+11, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2015-01-27 23:45:27 +0000, mclean**@****.com said:
> 
> > What difference do larger RMS buffers make to the search time?
> 
> It seems you might have little experience with a system that offers a 
> faster search?
> 
> As compared with a modern search?   No.   A modern search is not that 
> much slower than the results from a Google search, for instance.    If 
> you're referring to speeding an old-style search, I'd not expect larger 
> buffers to help all that much.  It's down to how big the I/O requests 
> and the associated and inherently sequential processing is.  You can 
> only make a search go so fast through most any file system -- it's only 
> as fast as the file system and the storage -- or you use a more modern 
> and caching search.
> 
> > I once wrote a 'copy' program (with an entry point to make it callable) 
> > that saw how much memory I had available (i.e. WSMAX less current 
> > allocation) and used a large chunk of that as the copy buffer.  I 
> > *think* it was faster than normal copy but it wasn't easy to check this 
> > because on the first run the file got cached on the SAN and read access 
> > fell quite a bit. A 'search' using a similar system might be very fast.
> 
> There would be some interest around faster plug-ins, but that stuff 
> runs in the background.  An analog found in various Unix systems is the 
> locate command -- that's nowhere near the search grammar supported by OS 
> X mdfind, or what ht:/Dig could get you, but it's still faster than 
> slogging through the directories using a traditional find or SEARCH 
> search.
> 
> -- 
> Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC

Are you talking of a pre-processing search that's parsed all file and saved the index in some file, much like web search engines?

I can see that being useful for some things (e.g. searching on a set of specific files) but not so much for wider use where the cost-benefit doesn't weigh up.

I just did a search across a whole bunch of .FOR, .C and even .OLB files to see if a specific string of characters existed in any of them.  Would mdfind be able to handle the .OLB object library?

John