Deserializing obj on network drive take a long time -- any ideas to improve

Question

Good morning!
Deserializing objects from a network drive is taking way too long, much slower than deserializing the same object files stored on the local hard drive of the development PC. How I can reduce the time??
The size of the serialized objects is small (72K and 17K).
The PC access network drives quickly enough (word processing, text editing, etc). The PC JVM is 1.5.0_09 and the OS is Windows XP.
Here is the background.
I had the idea to create objects and serialized them on my server (an AS400) and let client applications deserialize them.
Now that I have it running I find that deserializing the objects off the server take way too long! Does anyone have any ideas how to improve this.
If I copy the serialized objects off the server onto the local hard drive of the development PC and access them from the local hard drive the speed is fine.
To my mind that eliminates the potential for incompatibility between the JVM which serialized the objects and the JVM which descerialized the object. That is, the deserialize fast on the local drive, slow over the network.
Used both UNC and mapped drive to access the server and I can't see any performance difference. That is
filename = "//server/java/ftpaudit/SerializedObject.ser"
and
filename = "J:/ftpaudit/SerializedObject.ser"
where J: is mapped to //server/java
This is the code which deserialize the objects.
try {
     File file = new File(filename);
     FileInputStream f = new FileInputStream(file);
     ObjectInputStream ois = new ObjectInputStream(f);
     Object returnObj = ois.readObject();
     ois.close();
     f.close();
     return returnObj;
} catch (InvalidClassException ice) {
     ....Thank you for your time and help.
BillB

Answer 1

Could the file be locked on the server?I don't believe it is. It eventually (minutes loads). The delay is consistent. I haven't put the logging to see what part of the deserialize method is chewing up the time yet.
Putting in code to copy the file from the server to the local hard drive then deserializing performs much, much faster (milliseconds, almost as fast as deserializing directly from the local drive).
I modified this from another post to this forum
try {
        FileChannel srcChannel = new FileInputStream(file).getChannel();
        FileChannel dstChannel = new FileOutputStream(dir+file).getChannel();
        dstChannel.transferFrom(srcChannel, 0, srcChannel.size());
        srcChannel.close();
        dstChannel.close();
    } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }I was wondering if there was a more efficient way to deserialize an object than the one in my original post. Or if there were hidden aspects to consider such as buffer size.
Here's an alternative approach: since the server side
is written in Java (I'm assuming, since you say that
it writes a file containing serialized data), why not
create an RMI interface for retrieving the
information? The current approach, of opening a file
over the network, is very fragile -- what happens in
the network mount point or share name changes?Thank you. Good suggestion.