diskus

A minimal, fast alternative to du -sh.

diskus is a very simple program that computes the total size of the current directory. It is a parallelized version of du -sh. On my 8-core laptop, it is about nine times faster than du for a cold disk cache and more than twice as fast on a warm disk cache.

> diskus
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 diskus, we also add tin-summer (sn) and dust in our comparison. Both are also written in Rust and provide much more features than diskus (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' \
    'diskus' '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]
`diskus`	1.729 ± 0.012	1.717…1.756
`sn p -d0 -j8`	9.778 ± 0.098	9.587…9.904
`du -sb`	16.016 ± 0.067	15.923…16.147
`dust -d0`	19.845 ± 0.466	19.428…20.948

Warm disk cache

On a warm disk cache, the differences are smaller:

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

Command	Mean [ms]	Min…Max [ms]
`diskus`	465.9 ± 14.7	446.5…487.4
`sn p -d0 -j8`	596.4 ± 12.2	579.2…615.9
`du -sb`	1100.3 ± 20.5	1086.9…1153.0
`dust -d0`	3560.1 ± 27.8	3521.7…3612.8

Installation

On Debian-based systems

wget "https://github.com/sharkdp/diskus/releases/download/v0.3.0/diskus_0.3.0_amd64.deb"
sudo dpkg -i diskus_0.3.0_amd64.deb

On other distrubutions

Check out the release page for binary builds.

Via cargo

cargo install diskus

diskus 0.3.0