Re: fprintf performance

From:
"Tom Widmer [VC++ MVP]" <tom_usenet@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups:
microsoft.public.vc.language
Date:
Tue, 29 May 2007 11:36:31 +0100
Message-ID:
<OXaN60doHHA.4120@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl>
Ezmeralda wrote:

Hallo,

I am using fprintf to write a very large byte-array to disk.
In order to do this, I am writing each byte with a separate
fprintf-call in a text file (text file is a hard requirement
for my application).

Unfortunately, the performance of this disk-write is very poor:
over all, I do get only ~17Mbit/s, which is not acceptable
for my purpose.

How can I speed up my application?


Use fwrite or WriteFile rather than fprintf, making sure each call is
passed a large buffer (say 16K bytes). You should format the text in the
buffer manually (avoid sprintf too!).

e.g.
int const buffer_size = 16384;
char buffer[buffer_size];
int bufferPos = 0;
for (int i = 0; i != byte_array_size; ++i)
{
   char const currentByte = byte_array[i];
   //format currentByte into buffer, incrementing bufferPos
   //and checking whether buffer is full
   //(code depends on how you were using fprintf)

   if (bufferPos == buffer_size)
   {
     //empty buffer
     fwrite(buffer, bufferPos, file);
     bufferPos = 0;
   }
}

if (bufferPos > 0)
{
   //empty the last bit
   fwrite(buffer, bufferPos, file);
}

Error checking should be added.

Tom

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