Search for files over a mapped network drive

Question

Hi,
At the moment I'm using a simple listFiles with a FileFilter to do a search over a mapped network drive. But the performance is not very good.
The number of folders and files that need to be searched is rather high, resulting in long waiting times (+5min).
Is there a way to improve this type of searches?
Thanks in advance,
Dave

Answer 1

Hard to say without seeing details. Try to narrow down where it happens.
One nasty bug in Windows (let's assume you are using it) is that stat'ing all files in a directory is much faster than stat'ing them individually. In other words, if you do something like
    String names[] = directory.list();
    for (name in names) {
        File f = new File(name);
        if (f.isDirectory()) ...
    }that's way slower than:
    File files[] = directory.listFiles();
    for (f in files) {
        if (f.isDirectory()) ...
    }See if you do "new File()" for all files, e.g. in your filter. It will kill your performance. To demonstrate: open a big directory in standard Windows file explorer. Select all files. Right-click & select Properties. Go for lunch while Windows thinks about it. Compare with performance of clicking Properties for the directory instead of a collection of all the files.