you are in an fs with millions of small files

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Robert Watson <rwatson at FreeBSD.org> writes:
> - Some appliations behave poorly with large trees.  ls(1) is the classic
>    example -- sorting 150,000 strings is expensive, and should be avoided.

That's because fts's sorting code is brain-dead.  It starts by reading
the entire directory into a linked list, then copies that list into an
array which it passes to qsort(), and finally converts the array back
into a linked list.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no