A minimal, fast alternative to du -sh.
diskus is a very simple program that computes the total size of the current directory. It is a
parallelized version of du -sh. On my 8-core laptop, it is about nine times faster than du for
a cold disk cache and more than twice as fast on a warm disk cache.
``` bash
diskus 14.56 GB (14556806983 bytes) ```
The following benchmarks have been performed with hyperfine on a moderately large folder (15GB, 100k directories, 400k files). Smaller folders are not really of any interest since all programs would finish in a reasonable time that would not interrupt your workflow.
In addition to du and diskus, we also add tin-summer (sn) and
dust in our comparison. Both are also written in Rust and provide
much more features than diskus (check them out!). The optimal number of threads for sn (-j option) was
determined via hyperfine --parameter-scan.
bash
sudo -v
hyperfine --prepare 'sync; echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches' \
'diskus' 'sn p -d0 -j8' 'du -sb' 'dust -d0'
(the sudo/sync/drop_caches commands are a way to
clear the filesystem caches between benchmarking runs)
| Command | Mean [s] | Min…Max [s] |
|:---|---:|---:|
| diskus | 1.729 ± 0.012 | 1.717…1.756 |
| sn p -d0 -j8 | 9.778 ± 0.098 | 9.587…9.904 |
| du -sb | 16.016 ± 0.067 | 15.923…16.147 |
| dust -d0 | 19.845 ± 0.466 | 19.428…20.948 |
On a warm disk cache, the differences are smaller:
bash
hyperfine --warmup 5 'diskus' 'sn p -d0 -j8' 'du -sb' 'dust -d0'
| Command | Mean [ms] | Min…Max [ms] |
|:---|---:|---:|
| diskus | 465.9 ± 14.7 | 446.5…487.4 |
| sn p -d0 -j8 | 596.4 ± 12.2 | 579.2…615.9 |
| du -sb | 1100.3 ± 20.5 | 1086.9…1153.0 |
| dust -d0 | 3560.1 ± 27.8 | 3521.7…3612.8 |
bash
wget "https://github.com/sharkdp/diskus/releases/download/v0.3.0/diskus_0.3.0_amd64.deb"
sudo dpkg -i diskus_0.3.0_amd64.deb
Check out the release page for binary builds.
cargo install diskus