Efficient log backup program in C#

I am writing a log backup program in C#. The main objective is to take logs from multiple servers, copy and compress the files and then move them to a central data storage server. I will have to move about 270Gb of data every 24 hou开发者_开发百科rs. I have a dedicated server to run this job and a LAN of 1Gbps. Currently I am reading lines from a (text)file, copying them into a buffer stream and writing them to the destination.

My last test copied about 2.5Gb of data in 28 minutes. This will not do. I will probably thread the program for efficiency, but I am looking for a better method to copy the files.

I was also playing with the idea of compressing everything first and then using a stream buffer a bit to copy. Really, I am just looking for a little advice from someone with more experience than me.

Any help is appreciated, thanks.

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You first need to profile as Umair said so that you can figure out how much of the 28 minutes is spent compressing vs. transmitting. Also measure the compression rate (bytes/sec) with different compression libraries, and compare your transfer rate against other programs such as Filezilla to see if you're close to your system's maximum bandwidth.

One good library to consider is DotNetZip, which allows you to zip to a stream, which can be handy for large files.

Once you get it fine-tuned for one thread, experiment with several threads and watch your processor utilization to see where the sweet spot is.

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One of the solutions can be is what you mantioned: compress files in one Zip file and after transfer them via network. This will bemuch faster as you are transfering one file and often on of principal bottleneck during file transfers is Destination security checks. So if you use one zip file, there should be one check.

In short:

1. Compress

2. Transfer

3. Decompress (if you need)

This already have to bring you big benefits in terms of performance.

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Compress the logs at source and use TransmitFile (that's a native API - not sure if there's a framework equivalent, or how easy it is to P/Invoke this) to send them to the destination. (Possibly HttpResponse.TransmitFile does the same in .Net?)

In any event, do not read your files linewise - read the files in blocks (loop doing FileStream.Read for 4K - say - bytes until read count == 0) and send that direct to the network pipe.

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Trying profiling your program... bottleneck is often where you least expect it to be. As some clever guy said "Premature optimisation is the root of all evil".

Once in a similar scenario at work, I was given the task to optimise the process. And after profiling the bottleneck was found to be a call to sleep function (which was used for synchronisation between thread!!!! ).