Question

My application continuously calculates strings and outputs them into a file. This is being run for almost an entire day. But writing to the file is slowing my application. Is there a way I can improve the speed ? Also I want to extend the application so that I can send the results to an another system after some particular amount of time.

Thanks & Regards,

Mousey

Answer 1

There are several things that may or may not help you, depending on your scenario:

1. Consider using asynchronous I/O, for instance by using Boost.Asio. This way your application does not have to wait for expensive I/O-operations to finish. However, you will have to buffer your generated data in memory, so make sure there is enough available.
2. Consider buffering your strings to a certain size, and then write them to disk (or the network) in big batches. Few big writes are usually faster than many small ones.
3. If you want to make it really good C++, meaning STL-comliant, make your algorithm a template-function that takes and output-iterator as argument. This way you can easily have it write to files, the network, memory or the console by providing appropriate iterators.