Performance issues

[Blackstone, J. David]

  Not sure if this is truly a bug report, but a simple ls -1 is very slow in
a directory with a large number of files:

    $ time ls -1  # GNU ls
    real    2m22.169s
    user    0m2.080s
    sys     0m5.850s
    $ time /bin/ls -1  # Solaris ls
    real    0m18.013s
    user    0m1.230s
    sys     0m1.390s
    $ time ~/perlls.pl  # Custom Perl program
    real    0m22.355s
    user    0m1.200s
    sys     0m1.260s

  (Apologies if this mail is converted to HTML; my employer converts them
even though I send in plain text.)