11-07-2023, 04:48 AM
Sounds like the system isn't doing multiple transfers. With the 4000 file output, it's connecting to the drive and having to write a line of data, do whatever confirmation it does to make certain the data transferred is valid, and then finally moves on to do the next line of data. With the second method, it's transfering the whole file in one pass, then doing the validation, which saves a lot of time overall.
We see a similar type of behavior to this in OPEN FOR INPUT, which has to read a file one byte at a time, resulting in many many many unnecessary disk reads. (Whereas reading AS BINARY reads data at the sector/clusters size of your drive -- let's say 4096 bytes for example -- which means you're doing in one disk read what INPUT takes 4096 disk reads and transfers to do.
IIRC, QB64 does a very similar method of drive writing such as your first example -- one line of a program at a time, dumped via a simple DO..LOOP. It's never been an issue before, in the past, with saving to local drives, so nobody's ever bothered to optimize it. Changing that save routine to using a single PUT statement as you've done in your second example should be easy enough to do. It's late here tonight, but I'll take a look in our internals tomorrow and see about swapping us over to a single binary write of the whole file, and then you can test it out later and see if it makes much of a difference on your system.
We see a similar type of behavior to this in OPEN FOR INPUT, which has to read a file one byte at a time, resulting in many many many unnecessary disk reads. (Whereas reading AS BINARY reads data at the sector/clusters size of your drive -- let's say 4096 bytes for example -- which means you're doing in one disk read what INPUT takes 4096 disk reads and transfers to do.
IIRC, QB64 does a very similar method of drive writing such as your first example -- one line of a program at a time, dumped via a simple DO..LOOP. It's never been an issue before, in the past, with saving to local drives, so nobody's ever bothered to optimize it. Changing that save routine to using a single PUT statement as you've done in your second example should be easy enough to do. It's late here tonight, but I'll take a look in our internals tomorrow and see about swapping us over to a single binary write of the whole file, and then you can test it out later and see if it makes much of a difference on your system.