Command line tool to find(1) or grep(1) faster?
 

I frequently search through certain big directories, and it takes a long time. Surely there's something that makes this faster? Any suggestions?

'locate' (and slocate) is much faster than find, as long as you keep the db up-to-date. (updatedb).

grep is going to work as fast as the hardware will permit, I suppose.

find and locate typically are used to look for files. grep is used to look for words in a file--or in a data stream. Obviously, the data stream can be generated by doing a list of files---as in ls /dirname/*|grep keyword.

Using grep as a general tool to find files does not seem like the best choice.