How do I avoid excessive Network File I/O when appending to a large file with .NET?

Question

I have a program that opens a large binary file, appends a small amount of data to it, and closes the file.

FileStream fs = File.Open( "\\\\s1\\temp\\test.tmp", FileMode.Append, FileAccess.Write, FileShare.None );
fs.Write( data, 0, data.Length );
fs.Close();

If test.tmp is 5MB before this program is run and the data array is 100 bytes, this program will cause over 5MB of data to be transmitted across the network. I would have expected that the data already in the file would not be transmitted across the network since I'm not reading it or writing it. Is there any way to avoid this behavior? This makes it agonizingly slow to append to very large files.

Answer 1

0xA3 provided the answer in a commment above. The poor performance was due to an on-access virus scan. Each time my program opened the file, the virus scanner read the entire contents of the file to check for viruses even though my program didn't read any of the existing content. Disabling the on-access virus scan eliminated the excessive network I/O and the poor performance.

Thanks to everyone for your suggestions.

Answer 2

I found this on MSDN (CreateFile is called internally):

When an application creates a file across a network, it is better to use GENERIC_READ | GENERIC_WRITE for dwDesiredAccess than to use GENERIC_WRITE alone. The resulting code is faster, because the redirector can use the cache manager and send fewer SMBs with more data. This combination also avoids an issue where writing to a file across a network can occasionally return ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED.

Using Reflector, FileAccess maps to dwDesiredAccess, so it would seem to suggest using FileAccess.ReadWrite instead of just FileAccess.Write.

I have no idea if this will help :)