[Gnu-arch-users] readdir() optimization for ext3/Linux 2.6

[Florian Weimer]

I've just finished a patch for Maildir support in mutt CVS that sorts
the directory entries by inode before opening them.  Without this
optimization, you incur a tremendous seek overhead because due to the
new directory hashing, readdir() returns the entries in random order.
On an uncached Maildir folder with 18,000+ messages, my patch cuts down
the time required for parsing the folder contents from 200 seconds to
below 15.

I think this could speed up tree traversals for tla, too.