Could you please give us a sample of code you are using to come up with these stats? How many files are we talking about here?
Note: in case you didn't know, $findfile is a loop in itself, doing "var %a 1 | while ($findfile(dir,*,%a) != $null) { echo -a $v1 | inc %a }" is not proper and is indeed very very slow, because it has to reevaluate $findfile each time "noop $findfile(dir,*,0,echo -a $1-)" is proper.
