Opening many small files on NTFS is way too slow

Question

I am writing a program that should process many small files, say thousands or even millions. I\'ve been testing that part on 500k files, and the first step was just to iterate a

Answer 1

There is an hack you can try: zip these files with a low compression ratio and then use some Zip Libraries to read them, this is usually way faster than reading the single files one by one. Of copurse this should be done in advance as a pre process step.