Reading large text files with streams in C#

Question

I\'ve got the lovely task of working out how to handle large files being loaded into our application\'s script editor (it\'s like VBA for our internal product for quick macr

Answer 1

You can improve read speed by using a BufferedStream, like this:

using (FileStream fs = File.Open(path, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.ReadWrite))
using (BufferedStream bs = new BufferedStream(fs))
using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(bs))
{
    string line;
    while ((line = sr.ReadLine()) != null)
    {

    }
}

March 2013 UPDATE

I recently wrote code for reading and processing (searching for text in) 1 GB-ish text files (much larger than the files involved here) and achieved a significant performance gain by using a producer/consumer pattern. The producer task read in lines of text using the BufferedStream and handed them off to a separate consumer task that did the searching.

I used this as an opportunity to learn TPL Dataflow, which is very well suited for quickly coding this pattern.

Why BufferedStream is faster

A buffer is a block of bytes in memory used to cache data, thereby reducing the number of calls to the operating system. Buffers improve read and write performance. A buffer can be used for either reading or writing, but never both simultaneously. The Read and Write methods of BufferedStream automatically maintain the buffer.

December 2014 UPDATE: Your Mileage May Vary

Based on the comments, FileStream should be using a BufferedStream internally. At the time this answer was first provided, I measured a significant performance boost by adding a BufferedStream. At the time I was targeting .NET 3.x on a 32-bit platform. Today, targeting .NET 4.5 on a 64-bit platform, I do not see any improvement.

Related

I came across a case where streaming a large, generated CSV file to the Response stream from an ASP.Net MVC action was very slow. Adding a BufferedStream improved performance by 100x in this instance. For more see Unbuffered Output Very Slow