what is faster to read, ASCII or Binary?

Question

I am presently working on a C++ project that involves reading in thousands of small (~20kb) text files which are all in ASCII format.

Will I be able to get a significant performance improvement by converting all of the files into Binary before analyzing them?

Answer 1

Converting a string to a number, while not cheap in cpu cycles, is a non-issue. The amount of overhead involved with I/O is always orders of magnitude larger than the conversion. The size of the file is not much of an issue either, a disk supplies 8KB about as fast as 20KB, it all comes out of the same cluster on the same track. Having thousands of files is a big issue, opening a file involves moving the disk reader head and that takes forever.

So focus on whittling down the number of files for a real gain.

Answer 2

There is no real difference between "ASCII" and "Binary" if you're handling text. ASCII is an interpretation of Binary data as text. So, if I understand your question correctly, the answer is no, there is no conversion that is possible and there is no performance improvement.