Specifying Folders In `buf generate --path` Arguments Causes Massive Performance Hit about buf

[bufdev]

That doesn't seem that unexpected - if buf has to search /foo/bar/directory for all relevant .proto files, that's going to take some time (and I'm certain that however buf searches for it is not as optimized as some typical bash tools are) - we can look into optimizing that path a bit, but searching a directory with 100,000+ files for 11 specific .proto files is going to take some time.

[jhump]

@bufdev, IIRC, the foo/bar/directory folder does not have that many files. The issue is that the "input" to buf was unspecified, and thus default to the current working directory. The current working directory is the root of the repo and huge. When --path indicates a file, it is fast. But it seems like --path with a directory name isn't actually looking only at that one directory but instead collecting everything in the "input" module (so scanning the huge repo root directory) and then filtering the result based on prefix match. (The above is my suspicion based on the observed behavior; I haven't gone through the implementation code yet to confirm what it's doing.)

[bufdev]

That shouldn't be the case - we have optimized for that scenario, so it should only do the search on the directory specified in --path. There may be a regression - we have to play with this locally.