Read whole file in memory VS read in chunks

Question

I\'m relatively new to C# and programming, so please bear with me. I\'m working an an application where I need to read some files and process those files in chunks (for example

Answer 1

It is recommended to read files in buffers of 4K or 8K.

You should really never read files all at once if you want to write it back to another stream. Just read to a buffer and write the buffer back. This is especially through for web programming.

If you have to load the whole file since your operation (text-processing, etc) needs the whole content of the file, buffering does not really help, so I believe it is preferable to use File.ReadAllText or File.ReadAllBytes.

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Why 4KB or 8KB?

This is closer to the underlying Windows operating system buffers. Files in NTFS are normally stored in 4KB or 8KB chuncks on the disk although you can choose 32KB chuncks