A minimal, fast alternative to 'du -sh'

dup

A minimal, fast alternative to du -sh .

dup is a very simple program that computes the total filesize of the current directory. It is a parallelized version of du -sh or rather du -sh --bytes . On my 8-core laptop, it is about five times faster than du .

> dup
14.56 GB (14556806983 bytes)

Benchmark

The following benchmarks have been performed with hyperfine on a moderately large folder (15GB, 100k directories, 400k files). Smaller folders are not really of any interest since all programs would finish in a reasonable time that would not interrupt your workflow.

In addition to du and dup , we also add tin-summer ( sn ) and dust in our comparison. Both are also written in Rust and provide much more features than dup (check them out!). The optimal number of threads for sn ( -j option) was determined via hyperfine --parameter-scan .

Cold disk cache

sudo -v
hyperfine --prepare 'sync; echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches' \
    'dup' 'sn p -d0 -j8' 'du -sb' 'dust -d0'

(the sudo / sync / drop_caches commands are a way to clear the filesystem caches between benchmarking runs )

Command Mean [s] Min…Max [s] dup 3.212 ± 0.030 3.185…3.276 sn p -d0 -j8 9.747 ± 0.089 9.646…9.908 du -sb 16.001 ± 0.091 15.854…16.181 dust -d0 19.921 ± 0.354 19.508…20.613

Warm disk cache

On a warm disk cache, the differences are smaller. But I believe that in most situations where you are interested in total disk usage, you have a cold disk cache.

hyperfine --warmup 5 'dup' 'sn p -d0 -j8' 'du -sb' 'dust -d0'

Command Mean [ms] Min…Max [ms] dup 414.4 ± 7.1 404.9…425.3 sn p -d0 -j8 606.6 ± 20.0 572.8…647.2 du -sb 1105.2 ± 13.5 1089.3…1129.9 dust -d0 3600.4 ± 23.5 3561.7…3649.5

Installation

On Debian-based systems

wget "https://github.com/sharkdp/dup/releases/download/v0.1.0/dup_0.1.0_amd64.deb"
sudo dpkg -i dup_0.1.0_amd64.deb

On other distrubutions

Check out the release page for binary builds.