Speeding up file system access?

Question

My app scans part of a file system, and my users reported it was very slow when they were scanning a network drive. Testing my code, I identified the bottleneck: the methods

Answer 1

Just in case you haven't tried it yet, calling getBooleanAttributes yourself and performing the necessary masking will be considerably faster if you are performing multiple checks on the same file. While not a perfect solution (and one that starts to push your code to be platform specific), it could improve performance by a factor of 3 or 4. That's a pretty significant performance boost, even though it isn't nearly as fast as it should be.

The JDK7 java.nio.file.Path functionality should help this sort of thing quite a bit.

Finally, if you have any control at all over the end user environment, suggest that your users configure their antivirus software to not scan network drives. Many of the big AV solutions (not sure exactly what they are solving) have this turned on by default. I don't know what impact this may have on the various File methods, but we've found that improperly configured anit-virus can cause massive latency issues in almost every sort of file access on network resources.