os.stat bug?

[Christian Heimes]

Am 21.03.2011 09:32, schrieb Laszlo Nagy:
> I must also tell you that the os.stat call is taking long because this 
> system has about 7 million files on a slow disk. It would be normal for 
> an os.stat call to return after 10 seconds. I have no problem with that. 
> But I think that the 100% CPU is not acceptable. I guess that the code 
> is running in kernel mode. I think this because I can send a KILL signal 
> to it and the state changes to the following:

What's your operating system and file system? A better file system or
system setting may increase your performance a lot. XFS or ext3 / ext4
with hashed directory index increases the file lookup part from O(n) to
O(1).

> Could it be a problem with the operation system? Is it possible that an 
> os.stat call requires 100% CPU power from the OS? Or is it a problem 
> with the Python implementation?

It's mostly likely a problem with the OS, hardware and/or your
configuration. Python doesn't come with its own stat() implementation.
os.stat() just wraps the libc's stat() function. The heavy lifting is
done inside libc and the kernel.

Christian