Why copying badly named assets can freeze Unreal

Recently I found myself setting up another test project for some potential editor startup optimizations (if you follow my blog for while now this part probably doesn’t surprise you). For this, I repeatedly duplicated a bunch of small assets in the same folder, because I wanted to see the potential impact of pure asset count on the editor start. But, to my surprise, even before I restarted the editor, performance issues started to show up: Duplicating the assets became slower and slower, the more assets I duplicated at once. While duplicating a handful of assets wouldn’t even take a second, copying hundreds of assets would take multiple seconds. When copying 1000 assets, the editor froze for half a minute! Half a minute to copy a bare megabyte of data? That’s a copy speed of 30 kb/s, my first dial-up internet connection was faster than that. And I just want to copy data locally! Of course there’s always some overhead when copying a lot of smaller files, but even copying the files via…

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