[feature request] continual monitoring

[larsh]

This feature isn't in the most-requested list, nor do I see it suggested in this forum, though it's hard to tell because there's so much spam. I would be surprised if nobody's suggested it.

Basically, when you start up SM at the time you want to check usage of a large drive, it takes a long time to scan. As we all know.
The suggestion is to have SM running as a service in the background, something like Google Desktop does, keeping an eye on file system changes, and maintaining a continually-updated dataset about file and folder sizes.

Not everybody would want this, because of the memory and performance cost of keeping that data around all the time and updating it when the disk changed. (Hopefully the updates based on disk change could be delayed/buffered a bit so that they aren't quite so heavy during times of high disk activity. I don't think most people care about up-to-the-millisecond disk usage data.)

But for certain situations it would be very handy, so that when you need disk usage info, it's right there... you don't have to wait a long time for it.

E.g. I just ran a job on a Windows Server machine, a job that took 13+ hours and generated some 3 million PNG files (this is a map tile cache). To find out how much disk space it took, I'm going to "Properties" on the relevant folder. I would use Spacemonger, but I don't know how to limit it to that folder. As it is, the Windows Properties dialog is taking a loonnng time to tally up disk space for this folder tree. I would pay some good money for a service that would have that information already ready for me when I need it, as long as it didn't slow down the file-generation process too much.

Hope things are going well with you. Looking forward to seeing the next version of SM.