I had this strange problem for the past two weeks. A program which takes 14 minutes on my local machine consumes 98 minutes on my production server. The only reason is this – the location of my input files. I am comparing 10,000 XML files against another set of 10,000.

When i make this run from my local box, all the 20k files are in my desktop. But the 20k files are located on a shared drive on a different system for the production run.

The diff reports (10k individual reports and a Consolidated report) also needs to be moved to the shared drive. One of my seniors suggested me to copy the 10k files to a temporary folder in the production box, process it, generate the diff report (10k files) in the temp directory and then copy everything back to the shared drive. Initially, i thought it was absurd. What difference would it take between copying over a network and processing directly over the network. But it really worked great. My current run time in production box is brought down to 48 minutes (that is half the time).

Another thing i wanted to share is the deletion process of the temporary files.  As you know, i cant dump my prod box with temporary files.  Looping through the temp folder and then deleting was my option. But then i had this method in the java.io.File – deleteOnExit();

 Javadoc says that deleteOnExit requests that the file or directory denoted by this abstract pathname be deleted when the virtual machine terminates. So, after creation of the file, i just mark them for deletion on JVM exit. Works great.