Copying a lot of little files
Copying a lot of little files
Hi. In node.js projects you often deal with numerous small files, especially under node_modules. Moving the project to another drive feels like a slow process. This is mainly due to filesystem overhead. Do you have any experience with other filesystems? Are there options that perform better than NTFS and ext4?
Create a 7zip archive using the fastest settings, minimal compression. Copy the file to the archive and then extract it. The process uses multiple threads for packing but only handles one file at a time during copying and unpacking. The time comes from writing each file to disk, not from caching. It’s a straightforward, single-threaded operation—start writing, wait for confirmation, repeat for each file.
Considering this, I plan to use 7zip without compression. However, I doubt it will make a significant difference because the small file handling issues reappear once you unzip the archive. Still, I’ll give it a try after experimenting a bit. Thanks for the advice!