Question

I need to read a binary file consisting of 4 byte integers (little endian) into a 2D array for my Android application. My current solution is the following:

DataInputStream inp = null;
try {
    inp = new DataInputStream(new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(procData), 32768));
}
catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
    Log.e(TAG, "File not found");
}

int[][] test_data = new int[SIZE_X][SIZE_Y];
byte[] buffer = new byte[4];
ByteBuffer byteBuffer = ByteBuffer.allocate(4);
for (int i=0; i < SIZE_Y; i++) {
    for (int j=0; j < SIZE_X; j++) {
        inp.read(buffer);
        byteBuffer = ByteBuffer.wrap(buffer);
        test_data[j][SIZE_Y - i - 1] = byteBuffer.order(ByteOrder.LITTLE_ENDIAN).getInt();
    }
}

This is pretty slow for a 2k*2k array, it takes about 25 seconds. I can see in the DDMS that the garbage collector is working overtime, so that is probably one reason for the slowness.

There has to be a more efficient way of using the ByteBuffer to read that file into the array, but I’m not seeing it at the moment. Any idea on how to speed this up?

Answer 1

Why not read into a 4-byte buffer and then rearrange the bytes manually? It will look like this:

for (int i=0; i < SIZE_Y; i++) {
    for (int j=0; j < SIZE_X; j++) {
        inp.read(buffer);
        int nextInt = (buffer[0] & 0xFF) | (buffer[1] & 0xFF) << 8 | (buffer[2] & 0xFF) << 16 | (buffer[3] & 0xFF) << 24;
        test_data[j][SIZE_Y - i - 1] = nextInt;
    }
}

Of course, it is assumed that read reads all four bytes, but you should check for the situation when it’s not. This way you won’t create any objects during reading (so no strain on the garbage collector), you don’t call anything, you just use bitwise operations.