Question

I wrote a program looking for a specific file in the computer, but it suffers from slow and delays in obtaining the many files on your computer

This function is working to get all the files

void Get_Files(DirectoryInfo D)
        {
            FileInfo[] Files;
            try
            {
                Files = D.GetFiles("*.*");
                foreach (FileInfo File_Name in Files)
                    listBox3.Items.Add(File_Name.FullName);
            }
            catch { }

            DirectoryInfo[] Dirs;
            try
            {
                Dirs = D.GetDirectories();
                foreach (DirectoryInfo Dir in Dirs)
                {
                    if (!(Dir.ToString().Equals("$RECYCLE.BIN")) && !(Dir.ToString().Equals("System Volume Information")))
                        Get_Files(Dir);
                }
            }
            catch { }
        }

Is there another way to get a little faster all the computer files??

Answer 1

Use profiler to find out, what operation is the slowest. Then think about how to make it faster. Otherwise you can waste your time by optimizing something, that is not bottleneck and will not bring you expected speed up.

In your case, you will probably find, that when you call this function for the first time (when directory structure is not in cache), most time will be spent in GetDirectories() and GetFiles() functions. You can pre-cache list of all files in memory (or in database) and use FileSystemWatcher to monitor changes in filesystem to update your file list with new files. Or you can use existing services, such as Windows Indexing service, but these may not be available on every computer.

Second bottleneck could be adding files to ListBox. If number of added item is large, you can temporarily disable drawing of listbox using ListBox.BeginUpdate and when you finish, enable it again with ListBox.EndUpdate. This can sometimes lead to huge speed up.