delete is too slow

[shahidcodes]

First of all thanks for this amazing tool.

Describe the bug
npkill finds the node_modules, I hit space to delete, it says deleting and takes like 2-3 min per folder.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

• Run npkill on macos
• Total size reported was > 20GB
• Hit space for few folders

Expected behavior
Delete should be fast

Screenshots

• OS: Macos
• Version: 0.11.3

[cs118651]

same situation

[zaldih]

Related with #121

I am aware that sometimes the deletion is too slow, but I don't quite understand why. Maybe the OS does some security check or something.

Does anyone have any ideas?

[alan910127]

@zaldih I also ran into this issue on Linux and looked into the source code. I see that rm -rf is being used to delete the node_modules directory.

According to online benchmarks (see references), the following methods are significantly faster than rm -rf, ranked by speed:

1. perl
2. rsync --delete
3. find -delete

I haven't tested this on MacOS, but since these tools are pretty standard on Linux, they may work similarly on MacOS. A possible approach could be:

import fs from "node:fs";
import path from "node:path";

function executable(exe: string): string | null {
    const envPath = process.env.PATH ?? "";
    const envExt = process.env.PATHEXT ?? "";
    const pathDirs = envPath.replace(/["]+/g, "").split(path.delimiter).filter(Boolean);
    const extensions = envExt.split(";");
    const candidates = pathDirs.flatMap((d) => extensions.map((ext) => path.join(d, exe + ext)));
    try {
        return candidates.filter(checkFileExists)[0] ?? null;
    } catch (e) {
        return null;
    }
}

function checkFileExists(filePath: string): boolean {
    try {
        // assume files under PATH entry directories are executable
        return fs.statSync(filePath).isFile();
    } catch {
        return false;
    }
}

if (executable("perl")) {
    console.log("perl -e 'for(<*>){((stat)[9]<(unlink))}'");
} else if (executable("rsync")) {
    const temp = fs.mkdtempSync("empty");
    console.log(`rsync -a --delete ${temp}/ node_modules/`);
} else if (executable("find")) {
    console.log("find node_modules -type f -delete");
} else {
    console.log("rm -rf node_modules");
}

I'm not entirely sure about the Perl syntax and would need to research it further.

References:

• A faster way to delete millions of files in a directory
• Which is the fastest method to delete files in Linux
• Checking if an executable exists in PATH using Node.js