Some aspects of Tcl's filesystem (glob, file, pwd, cd primarily) became a bit slower with the vfs layer that was introducedin Tcl 8.4.0. This has gradually been addressed with later Tcl 8.4.x releases and also with Tcl 8.5.x. The current timings are as follows:
001 FILE exec interp 13185 14290 15333
002 FILE exec interp: pkg require 55423 73324 31033
003 FILE exec interp: pkg require+ 88259 102743 47400
004 FILE exec interp: pkg require+auto_path 70363 90178 44067
005 FILE exists tmpfile (obj) 20 21 100
006 FILE exists ~ 19 13 0
007 FILE exists! absolute tmpfile (obj) 19 18 0
008 FILE exists! absolute tmpfile (str) 184 360 0
009 FILE exists! relative tmpfile (obj) 17 31 100
010 FILE exists! relative tmpfile (str) 330 493 0
011 FILE exists! tmpfile (obj) 21 21 0
012 FILE exists! tmpfile (str) 289 435 0
013 FILE glob tmpdir (30 entries) / -dir 7495 5210 5200
014 FILE glob tmpdir (30 entries) / cd 5720 6001 5210
015 FILE glob tmpdir (subset of 30 entries) 2519 5073 4910
016 FILE glob / all subcommands 77893 68271 108560
017 FILE glob / atime 7698 8148 14120
018 FILE glob / attributes 49962 52209 47170
019 FILE glob / dirname 5710 5877 5310
020 FILE glob / executable 9542 7640 6210
021 FILE glob / exists 7237 7525 6110
022 FILE glob / extension 5330 5237 5100
023 FILE glob / isdirectory 7713 8021 12620
024 FILE glob / isfile 7728 8159 12620
025 FILE glob / mtime 7746 8007 12620
026 FILE glob / owned 7719 7931 12620
027 FILE glob / readable 11827 7658 6210
028 FILE glob / rootname 5341 5358 5100
029 FILE glob / size 7661 7997 12620
030 FILE glob / tail 5428 5518 5210
031 FILE glob / writable 11699 7608 6310
032 FILE glob deep dirs (30 entries+) 59103 58396 49970
033 FILE glob deep dirs (subset of 30 entries+) 36834 57647 48970
034 FILE glob dirs (30 entries) 4948 5108 12920
035 FILE recurse / -dir 107553 113229 140300
036 FILE recurse / cd 132796 180153 137800
037 FILE recurse+stat / -dir 138304 153763 247060
038 FILE recurse+stat / cd 164742 237494 239650
038 BENCHMARKS 1:8.5a0 2:8.4.5 3:8.3.5(This is for a slightly modified version of file.bench, and a slightly modified version of Tcl 8.5a0 which is undergoing performance testing, where the above timings are on WinXP).
If you have particular pieces of code using file, glob which are slower in Tcl 8.4/8.5, please add them to this page so that they can be added to the benchmark suite.
Note: reading from and writing to files is a totally separate topic channel i/o which is nothing to do with the vfs changes made to Tcl 8.4.0, and is therefore irrelevant to this particular benchmarking exercise on this page.