Bug#769066: lintian: Consider processing files in disk order

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Tue, Jul 07, 2020 at 06:34:05PM -0700, Felix Lechner wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > access files in disk order to increase performance
> 
> What was the speedup in man-db and dpkg, please?

~70% speedup in reinstalling a simple package using dpkg (27 seconds to
8 seconds):

  https://git.dpkg.org/cgit/dpkg/dpkg.git/commit/?id=8e31b0f0fb6b14e605407b824f4e2f1b0c12bab6

~69% speedup in "mandb -c" (104 seconds to 32 seconds), and ~49% speedup
in "man -K" (74 seconds to 38 seconds):

  https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=daee555135fbdca3c084a06dd3e1156f9ede24b8

This was all on rotational disks.  I expect SSDs would change things a
lot, though I don't think this sort of thing *hurts* on SSDs.

-- 
Colin Watson (he/him)                              [cjwatson@debian.org]