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 ten times faster than du with
a cold disk cache and more than three times faster with 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 | 1.649 ± 0.009 | 1.640…1.663 |
| sn p -d0 -j8 | 9.701 ± 0.067 | 9.598…9.828 |
| du -sb | 16.039 ± 0.069 | 15.918…16.152 |
| dust -d0 | 19.769 ± 0.285 | 19.564…20.561 |
On a warm disk cache, the differences are smaller:
bash
hyperfine --warmup 5 'diskus' 'sn p -d0 -j8' 'du -sb' 'dust -d0'
| Command | Mean [s] | Min…Max [s] |
|:---|---:|---:|
| diskus | 0.314 ± 0.007 | 0.303…0.329 |
| sn p -d0 -j8 | 0.622 ± 0.008 | 0.611…0.634 |
| du -sb | 1.130 ± 0.013 | 1.116…1.161 |
| dust -d0 | 3.593 ± 0.057 | 3.544…3.743 |
bash
wget "https://github.com/sharkdp/diskus/releases/download/v0.4.0/diskus_0.4.0_amd64.deb"
sudo dpkg -i diskus_0.4.0_amd64.deb
Download from the AUR: diskus or diskus-bin
Check out the release page for binary builds.
If you have Rust 1.29 or higher, you can install diskus from source via cargo:
cargo install diskus
Licensed under either of
at your option.