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 14848 14116 13033
002 FILE exec interp: pkg require 54447 69810 31033
003 FILE exec interp: pkg require+ 81868 98223 47400
004 FILE exec interp: pkg require+auto_path 64340 85805 46400
005 FILE exists tmpfile (obj) 21 23 0
006 FILE exists ~ 14 21 0
007 FILE exists! absolute tmpfile (obj) 17 18 0
008 FILE exists! absolute tmpfile (str) 182 204 100
009 FILE exists! relative tmpfile (obj) 22 18 0
010 FILE exists! relative tmpfile (str) 343 363 0
011 FILE exists! tmpfile (obj) 20 21 0
012 FILE exists! tmpfile (str) 284 304 100
013 FILE glob tmpdir (30 entries) / -dir 5036 5102 4810
014 FILE glob tmpdir (30 entries) / cd 5600 5654 5010
015 FILE glob tmpdir (subset of 30 entries) 2544 4986 4800
016 FILE glob / all subcommands 75864 66918 106850
017 FILE glob / atime 7587 7933 12420
018 FILE glob / attributes 49489 51030 46160
019 FILE glob / dirname 5605 5865 5210
020 FILE glob / executable 9507 7489 6110
021 FILE glob / exists 7162 7465 6010
022 FILE glob / extension 5179 5265 5010
023 FILE glob / isdirectory 7562 7952 12310
024 FILE glob / isfile 7629 7916 12420
025 FILE glob / mtime 7522 7909 12420
026 FILE glob / owned 7526 7877 12520
027 FILE glob / readable 11612 7475 6110
028 FILE glob / rootname 5214 5262 5000
029 FILE glob / size 7634 7866 12320
030 FILE glob / tail 5307 5472 5110
031 FILE glob / writable 11624 7463 6010
032 FILE glob deep dirs (30 entries+) 56694 57375 47870
033 FILE glob deep dirs (subset of 30 entries+) 36232 56717 46170
034 FILE glob dirs (30 entries) 4872 4936 12320
035 FILE recurse / -dir 105758 111418 137990
036 FILE recurse / cd 130812 177122 135690
037 FILE recurse+stat / -dir 136036 146569 243150
038 FILE recurse+stat / cd 161960 212755 240540
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.