Is there a workaround for Java's poor performance on walking huge directories?

Question

I am trying to process files one at a time that are stored over a network. Reading the files is fast due to buffering is not the issue. The problem I have is just listing

Answer 1

If you're on Java 1.5 or 1.6, shelling out "dir" commands and parsing the standard output stream on Windows is a perfectly acceptable approach. I've used this approach in the past for processing network drives and it has generally been a lot faster than waiting for the native java.io.File listFiles() method to return.

Of course, a JNI call should be faster and potentially safer than shelling out "dir" commands. The following JNI code can be used to retrieve a list of files/directories using the Windows API. This function can be easily refactored into a new class so the caller can retrieve file paths incrementally (i.e. get one path at a time). For example, you can refactor the code so that FindFirstFileW is called in a constructor and have a seperate method to call FindNextFileW.

JNIEXPORT jstring JNICALL Java_javaxt_io_File_GetFiles(JNIEnv *env, jclass, jstring directory)
{
    HANDLE hFind;
    try {

      //Convert jstring to wstring
        const jchar *_directory = env->GetStringChars(directory, 0);
        jsize x = env->GetStringLength(directory);
        wstring path;  //L"C:\\temp\\*";
        path.assign(_directory, _directory + x);
        env->ReleaseStringChars(directory, _directory);

        if (x<2){
            jclass exceptionClass = env->FindClass("java/lang/Exception");
            env->ThrowNew(exceptionClass, "Invalid path, less than 2 characters long.");
        }

        wstringstream ss;
        BOOL bContinue = TRUE;
        WIN32_FIND_DATAW data;
        hFind = FindFirstFileW(path.c_str(), &data);
        if (INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE == hFind){
            jclass exceptionClass = env->FindClass("java/lang/Exception");
            env->ThrowNew(exceptionClass, "FindFirstFileW returned invalid handle.");
        }


        //HANDLE hStdOut = GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE);
        //DWORD dwBytesWritten;


        // If we have no error, loop thru the files in this dir
        while (hFind && bContinue){

          /*
          //Debug Print Statment. DO NOT DELETE! cout and wcout do not print unicode correctly.
            WriteConsole(hStdOut, data.cFileName, (DWORD)_tcslen(data.cFileName), &dwBytesWritten, NULL);
            WriteConsole(hStdOut, L"\n", 1, &dwBytesWritten, NULL);
            */

          //Check if this entry is a directory
            if (data.dwFileAttributes & FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DIRECTORY){
                // Make sure this dir is not . or ..
                if (wstring(data.cFileName) != L"." &&
                    wstring(data.cFileName) != L"..")
                {   
                    ss << wstring(data.cFileName) << L"\\" << L"\n";
                }
            }
            else{
                ss << wstring(data.cFileName) << L"\n";
            }
            bContinue = FindNextFileW(hFind, &data);
        }   
        FindClose(hFind); // Free the dir structure



        wstring cstr = ss.str();
        int len = cstr.size();
        //WriteConsole(hStdOut, cstr.c_str(), len, &dwBytesWritten, NULL);
        //WriteConsole(hStdOut, L"\n", 1, &dwBytesWritten, NULL);
        jchar* raw = new jchar[len];
        memcpy(raw, cstr.c_str(), len*sizeof(wchar_t));
        jstring result = env->NewString(raw, len);
        delete[] raw;
        return result;
    }
    catch(...){
        FindClose(hFind);
        jclass exceptionClass = env->FindClass("java/lang/Exception");
        env->ThrowNew(exceptionClass, "Exception occured.");
    }

    return NULL;
}

Credit: https://sites.google.com/site/jozsefbekes/Home/windows-programming/miscellaneous-functions

Even with this approach, there are still efficiencies to be gained. If you serialize the path to a java.io.File, there is a huge performance hit - especially if the path represents a file on a network drive. I have no idea what Sun/Oracle is doing under the hood but if you need additional file attributes other than the file path (e.g. size, mod date, etc), I have found that the following JNI function is much faster than instantiating a java.io.File object on a network the path.

JNIEXPORT jlongArray JNICALL Java_javaxt_io_File_GetFileAttributesEx(JNIEnv *env, jclass, jstring filename)
{   

  //Convert jstring to wstring
    const jchar *_filename = env->GetStringChars(filename, 0);
    jsize len = env->GetStringLength(filename);
    wstring path;
    path.assign(_filename, _filename + len);
    env->ReleaseStringChars(filename, _filename);


  //Get attributes
    WIN32_FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DATA fileAttrs;
    BOOL result = GetFileAttributesExW(path.c_str(), GetFileExInfoStandard, &fileAttrs);
    if (!result) {
        jclass exceptionClass = env->FindClass("java/lang/Exception");
        env->ThrowNew(exceptionClass, "Exception Occurred");
    }

  //Create an array to store the WIN32_FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DATA
    jlong buffer[6];
    buffer[0] = fileAttrs.dwFileAttributes;
    buffer[1] = date2int(fileAttrs.ftCreationTime);
    buffer[2] = date2int(fileAttrs.ftLastAccessTime);
    buffer[3] = date2int(fileAttrs.ftLastWriteTime);
    buffer[4] = fileAttrs.nFileSizeHigh;
    buffer[5] = fileAttrs.nFileSizeLow;

    jlongArray jLongArray = env->NewLongArray(6);
    env->SetLongArrayRegion(jLongArray, 0, 6, buffer);
    return jLongArray;
}

You can find a full working example of this JNI-based approach in the javaxt-core library. In my tests using Java 1.6.0_38 with a Windows host hitting a Windows share, I have found this JNI approach approximately 10x faster then calling java.io.File listFiles() or shelling out "dir" commands.