I recently started to hack around Monticello due to very low response times when having a huge package cache.

Now interestingly the FilePlugin primitives for listing files are horrible!

Example:
-----------------------------------------------------------
MC often requests a list of all mzc's cached locally:
(FileDirectory default / 'package-cache') entries

In my case there are  4300 mczs in the shared package-cache
timeToRun yields a nightmarish 2050ms for this,
further investigation leads to the fact that most of the time is spent in the file primitive!

Now thats some 2ms for a single directory entry!
[Just as a side note, ruby1.8 does the same job in 10ms :D]
-----------------------------------------------------------

primLookupEntryIn: fullPath index: index
<primitive: 'primitiveDirectoryLookup' module: 'FilePlugin'>

-----------------------------------------------------------

I think we should definitely add another primitive which directly lists
the file under a certain path.

Of course this will break compatibility with existing code, but
I think the current approach does not scale...

best
cami