go-cp

Golang version of the command line utility cp(1).
Made just for fun to benchmark performance (and take a first stab at Golang).

Usage

./go-cp SOURCE DEST

NOTE: Recursive copying and clobbering is enabled by default.

Benchmarks

The following benchmarks were recorded for a file of size 1.5G on a 4-core machine, coreutils version 8.26.

• Destination file does not exist -

  	user (s)	system (s)	CPU (%)	total (s)
  cp	0.00	0.93	99	0.933
  go-cp	0.02	0.94	99	0.957

• Destination file exists (I'm interested in figuring out the cause of these stats!) -

  	user (s)	system (s)	CPU (%)	total (s)
  cp	0.00	1.34	10	12.809
  go-cp	0.01	0.63	99	0.642

Notes

The following points are noted for the second case (destination file exists) -

• Performance gain for go-cp and the corresponding loss for cp(1) is quite noticeable.
• CPU utilization for cp(1) is quite low as compared to first.
• It's worth mentioning that before running either of the utilities, sync was run to synchronize cached writes. Moreover, the difference in the total durations is still as significant as above if the caches are dropped via echo 3 > /proc/sys/vim/drop_caches.