Benchmarks · File Search · Apr 9 2026
412,000x.
VS Code is the most popular editor on Earth. Its built-in file finder, Ctrl+P, is one of the most-used features in the entire ecosystem. On a real C: drive it takes about thirty-five seconds to find a file. Interlinked finds the same file in eighty-five microseconds.
Interlinked Files
One file among 4.47 million
VS Code Ctrl+P
Same machine, same drive, same query
The test
One drive, five tools, one query.
Real machine, real C: drive. Years of repos, downloaded media, dependency caches, build outputs, screenshots. 4.47 million files. Query: the literal string iron man. Type it, start a stopwatch, stop the moment the first match appears. Median of five runs for indexed tools.
Machine
Ryzen 9 9950X3D
Memory
64 GB DDR5
Drive
2 TB NVMe
Files
4,470,000
Code Files
446,000
| Engine | Time | Ratio | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Interlinked Files | 85 us | 1x | Found instantly across 4.47M files |
| VS Code Ctrl+P | ~35 s | 412,000x | Recursive directory walk |
| Windows Search | 67.1 s | 480,000x | Indexer had to catch up |
| grep / CLI tools | 70.7 s | 832,000x | Full-disk scan |
| Claude Code (Opus 4.6) | 193.5 s | 2,276,000x | Chain of tool calls and retries |
The headline number (412,000x) is the gap between Interlinked and the file finder used by 70%+ of professional developers, on the same machine, against the same query.
The structural reason
VS Code walks the filesystem on every search.
VS Code's Ctrl+P is implemented in fileSearch.ts and fuzzyScorer.ts. When you type a query, the file finder walks the workspace using Node.js fs.readdir, recursively, and ranks results with fuzzy scoring. No persistent index. Every keystroke restarts the walk.
This works on a workspace of 1-10K files. It does not work on 4.47 million files. Nothing about this design will ever get faster.
VS Code approach
fs.readdir recursive on every query. No index. No cache. No shortcut. Time: O(n) where n = every file on the drive.
Interlinked approach
Live persistent index. The walk happened once, ahead of time. Queries hit the index, not the filesystem. Time: O(1) amortized.
Full benchmark
Eighteen queries side by side.
Same machine, same drive. Median of five runs for indexed tools. VS Code is omitted because every query takes ~35s regardless, dominated by directory walk time.
Median
Across 20 queries
Best
test6767
Worst
Still sub-millisecond
| Query | Interlinked | Windows Search | CLI Tools |
|---|---|---|---|
| package.json | 497 us | 63.0 s | 69.5 s |
| tsconfig.json | 332 us | 65.8 s | 70.9 s |
| .gitignore | 212 us | 128.2 s | 70.6 s |
| globals.css | 117 us | 65.9 s | 70.6 s |
| Dockerfile | 206 us | 65.0 s | 70.9 s |
| analytics | 346 us | 67.7 s | 70.3 s |
| middleware | 155 us | 65.4 s | 70.5 s |
| controller | 806 us | 68.2 s | 70.0 s |
| schema | 253 us | 72.7 s | 70.6 s |
| readme | 301 us | 68.1 s | 71.4 s |
| iron man | 85 us | 67.1 s | 70.7 s |
| chrome | 143 us | 67.9 s | 69.8 s |
| nvidia | 188 us | 67.0 s | 69.9 s |
| discord | 245 us | 66.3 s | 69.9 s |
| python | 227 us | 67.3 s | 70.2 s |
| test6767 | 2 us | 67.6 s | 69.2 s |
| log | 86 us | 66.9 s | 72.4 s |
Highlighted row is the headline query. Worst case across all queries is 806 us, still sub-millisecond, while every disk-walking tool on the same drive needs tens of seconds.
Interlinked's worst case beats every other tool's best case.
806 us vs 35 seconds. On the same drive.Summary
Median, best, worst across all five tools.
| Interlinked | VS Code | Windows Search | CLI Tools | Claude Code | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Median | 139 us | ~35 s | 67 s | 71 s | 193.5 s |
| Best | 2 us | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Worst | 806 us | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| vs Interlinked | baseline | 412,000x | 480,000x | 832,000x | 2,276,000x |
What this means
Inside a workspace, Ctrl+P is fine.
If you live inside a VS Code workspace and never search outside it, Ctrl+P does its job. It was built for the workspace boundary and it works within it.
The moment you need to search across all of your code (across every project in your ~/dev folder, or across the whole machine), VS Code is the wrong tool, and there is no version of VS Code that will fix it without a redesign of the file finder.
#1 Interlinked
Median, 4.47M files
#2 VS Code Ctrl+P
412,000x slower
#3 Windows Search
480,000x slower
The gap Interlinked fills
Not a plugin. An indexed file engine.
Same query, same machine, same drive. Four hundred and twelve thousand times faster. No agent, no model, no plugin: just an indexed file engine doing what filesystems should have done in the first place.
The implications go beyond developer tooling. When your AI agent can find any file on the machine in microseconds instead of minutes, context retrieval stops being the bottleneck. The model ceiling is already reachable. The next frontier is what's wrapped around the model, and that starts with knowing where everything is, instantly.
Every tool in this benchmark that took more than a second was walking the disk. Interlinked never walks the disk. That's not an optimization. It's a different architecture.