i agree. `find somewhere -exec some_command {} +` can be dramatically faster. but it does not guarantee a single invocation of `some_command`, it may make multiple invocations if you pass very large numbers of matching files
after spending a bit of time reading the man page for find, i rarely use xargs any more. find is pretty good.
tangent:
another instance i've seen where spawning many processes can lead to bad performance is in bash scripts for git pre-recieve hooks, to scan and validate the commit message of a range of commits before accepting them. it is pretty easy to cobble together some loop in a bash script that executes multiple processes _per commit_. that's fine for typical small pushes of 1-20 commits -- but if someone needs to do serious graph surgery and push a branch of 1000 - 10,000 commits that can can cause very long running times -- and more seriously, timeouts, where the entire push gets rejected as the pre-receive script takes too long. a small program using the libgit2 API can do the same work at the cost of a single process, although then you have the fun of figuring out how to build, install and maintain binary git pre-receive hooks.
after spending a bit of time reading the man page for find, i rarely use xargs any more. find is pretty good.
tangent:
another instance i've seen where spawning many processes can lead to bad performance is in bash scripts for git pre-recieve hooks, to scan and validate the commit message of a range of commits before accepting them. it is pretty easy to cobble together some loop in a bash script that executes multiple processes _per commit_. that's fine for typical small pushes of 1-20 commits -- but if someone needs to do serious graph surgery and push a branch of 1000 - 10,000 commits that can can cause very long running times -- and more seriously, timeouts, where the entire push gets rejected as the pre-receive script takes too long. a small program using the libgit2 API can do the same work at the cost of a single process, although then you have the fun of figuring out how to build, install and maintain binary git pre-receive hooks.