Potential Scanning Optimization?

[nomorefood]

It's possible Beyond Compare already does this, but I was recently developing my own program with the need to perform file scanning / changes on a network file server very quickly.

Skeptical about the performance of the reentrant-oriented standard Windows Find APIs, I experimented with the lower-level NtOpenFile/NtQueryDirectoryFile with a large FileInformation buffer and ReturnSingleEntry = FALSE. When it came to enumerating a local directory, the change made very little impact but when enumerating a remote server, performance was about twice as fast on a server that is on same network switch that I am. I suspect the performance multiplier would be higher on higher-latency servers.

Just a curiosity...

[Zoë]

FindFirstFileEx has a FIND_FIRST_EX_LARGE_FETCH flag that likely produces the same behavior, and yes, Beyond Compare will already use that to enumerate remote Windows servers. Other SMB servers (Samba, OS X) can be buggy when using it, so it generally is not used for them.