Home > Files & Folders >
Deleting Large Numbers of Files

Overview

How do both operating systems deal with manipulating large numbers of files? To find out, we ran some simple tests.

Our test computers were a 400 MHz G4 and a 400 MHz Pentium III. Keep in mind that (a) these are not equivalent systems (the 400 MHz G4 is faster), and (b) both of these systems are a good number of years old. That being said, we tried deleting 1,500 files from within the GUI (Finder or Windows Explorer), as well as from the command line (Terminal or Command Prompt).

Mac OS X

Time taken to perform the deletion:

  • From the command line: <1 second
  • From the GUI: 16 seconds (move to Trash) + 3 seconds (empty Trash) = 19 seconds

Windows XP

Time taken to perform the deletion:
  • From the command line: 4 seconds
  • From the GUI: 16 seconds

Conclusion

Both operating systems performed the command line deletion very quickly, with OS X winning (although this could be attributed in part to the test Mac being somewhat faster than the test PC). Both operating systems also performed admirably when deleting 1,500 files via the GUI, although both clearly took much longer to perform the deletion in this fashion.

It should be noted that delays in deletion occur only when selecting and deleting individual files. If you select the actual folder containing the files, both operating systems perform the deletion almost instantly.

Mac OS X: 8
Windows XP: 8

Back Working with Busy Files | Next Managing Deleted Files