Faster sorting or searching by date or size

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ma2418
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Nov 05, 2010 9:33 am

Faster sorting or searching by date or size

Post by ma2418 »

When everything parses $MFT it obtains alsow the file alterration/creation date and filesize from the filerecords.
-A faster sorting can be done by introducing some checkboxes and editboxes with the option to search by date or size.
This option can be toggled and wont decrese the search speed.
-A better sort method for large number of items("ava find" does a pretty good job here).

An ideea is to implement an adaptive search method to switch to the search algoritm most suited for the number of items in the result list.

I for example, at work need to write a list on every month-end with all the projects i have worked on, i will write in the search editbox the search term :"*.dwg", and then do a date sorting, and that consumes a great ammount of time.

Thank you very much.
daspud
Posts: 103
Joined: Wed Apr 01, 2009 3:15 am

Re: Faster sorting or searching by date or size

Post by daspud »

Searching by date or size will very much slow down the search. In order to search by file date or size EVERY file in the system must be examined and the date and time and size extracted. With search by name, path or extension only an internal table maintained by Everything needs to be searched. That is why it is so fast.

Just before Everything displays the file on the screen it does a lookup for the date time and size. this is why sometimes you may see the screen "paint" the lines down or see a slow response on paging from one page to the next.

If you click on a header line (say Date), then Everything reads all the date information for all the files in the search result. If you have 20 files in the result then it is very fast. If you have 5,000 then it will be much slower. If you ask for all files on a certain date then Everything will have to examine every file in the system. If you ask for all files of a certain name and there are not too many the result is very fast.

I hope this helps you understand the speed of Everything. I wish it could get all the pertinent file info this fast, but only name, extension and path are available.
leuce
Posts: 4
Joined: Sat Nov 27, 2010 9:37 pm

Re: Faster sorting or searching by date or size

Post by leuce »

I too would like to see a date option in the search options. Even if one has to specify the date range *after* the search is displayed, it would be hugely helpful. I have seen utilities that "filter" items in a results column, i.e. the column header is actually a little search box, and as you type in it, anything that doesn't match it is hidden from view. This would be useful because then one can filter in or filter out dates after the search results are displayed. Would this be possible?

Samuel
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