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Asked: 2026-06-06T14:19:21+00:00

I was thinking… Does Multithreading using c# in I/O operations ( lets say copying

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I was thinking…

Does Multithreading using c# in I/O operations ( lets say copying many files from c:\1\ to c:\2\ ) , will have performance differences rather than doing the operation – sequential ?

The reason why im struggle with myself is that an IO operation finally – is One item which has to do work. so even if im working in parallel – he will still execute those copy orders as sequential…

or maybe my assumption is wrong ?

in that case is there any benefit of using multithreaded copy to :

  • copy many small file ( sum 4GB)
  • copy 4 big files ( sum 4 gb , 1000 mb each)

thanks

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Like others says, it has to be measured against concrete application context.

    But just would like to invite an attention on this.
    Every time you copy a file the permission of Write access to destination location is checked, which is slow.

    All of us met a case when you have to copy/paste a sequence of already compressed files, and if you them compress again into one big ZIP file, so the total compressed size is not significally smaller then the sum of all content, the IO operation will be executed a way faster. (Just try it, you will see a huge difference, if you didn’t do it before).

    So I would assume (again it has to be measured on concrete system, mine are just guesses) that having one big file write on single disk, will be faster the a lot of small files.

    Hope this helps.

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