Directory file size calculation - how to make it faster?

Question

Using C#, I am finding the total size of a directory. The logic is this way : Get the files inside the folder. Sum up the total size. Find if there are sub directories. Then do a recursive search.

I tried one another way to do this too : Using FSO (obj.GetFolder(path).Size). There's not much of difference in time in both these approaches.

Now the problem is, I have tens of thousands of files in a particular folder and its taking like atleast 2 minute to find the folder size. Also, if I run the program again, it happens very quickly (5 secs). I think the windows is caching the file sizes.

Is there any way I can bring down the time taken when I run the program first time??

Answer 1

If fiddled with it a while, trying to Parallelize it, and surprisingly - it speeded up here on my machine (up to 3 times on a quadcore), don't know if it is valid in all cases, but give it a try...

.NET4.0 Code (or use 3.5 with TaskParallelLibrary)

    private static long DirSize(string sourceDir, bool recurse)
    {
        long size = 0;
        string[] fileEntries = Directory.GetFiles(sourceDir);

        foreach (string fileName in fileEntries)
        {
            Interlocked.Add(ref size, (new FileInfo(fileName)).Length);
        }

        if (recurse)
        {
            string[] subdirEntries = Directory.GetDirectories(sourceDir);

            Parallel.For<long>(0, subdirEntries.Length, () => 0, (i, loop, subtotal) =>
            {
                if ((File.GetAttributes(subdirEntries[i]) & FileAttributes.ReparsePoint) != FileAttributes.ReparsePoint)
                {
                    subtotal += DirSize(subdirEntries[i], true);
                    return subtotal;
                }
                return 0;
            },
                (x) => Interlocked.Add(ref size, x)
            );
        }
        return size;
    }