avoiding scans of whole directory tree

[Adrian Buehlmann]

On 28.05.2008 09:52, Mohit Aron wrote:
> On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 12:47 AM, Adrian Buehlmann <adrian at cadifra.com
> <mailto:adrian at cadifra.com>> wrote:
> 
>     On 28.05.2008 09:34, Mohit Aron wrote:
>     > Hello,
>     >
>     > commands like 'hg status' scan the full workspace to detect what's
>     > changed.
> 
>     That's incorrect. See DirState on the wiki
> 
> How does that prevent a full namespace scan ? I understand that it saves
> mercurial from actually having to read the data of all files. It does
> need to read the metadata though - which is a killer if there are lots
> and lots of files. Even worse if the workspace is on NFS.

Why is it a "killer"?

Can you provide some run time measurement samples?

Please provide exact environment info (os, Mercurial version) in case you do.