You might try removing the BufferedWriter and just using the FileWriter directly. On a modern system there's a good chance you're just writing to the drive's cache memory anyway.
It takes me in the range of 4-5 seconds to write 175MB (4 million strings) -- this is on a dual-core 2.4GHz Dell running Windows XP with an 80GB, 7200-RPM Hitachi disk.
Can you isolate how much of the time is record retrieval and how much is file writing?
import java.io.BufferedWriter;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileWriter;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.Writer;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
public class FileWritingPerfTest {
private static final int ITERATIONS = 5;
private static final double MEG = (Math.pow(1024, 2));
private static final int RECORD_COUNT = 4000000;
private static final String RECORD = "Help I am trapped in a fortune cookie factory\n";
private static final int RECSIZE = RECORD.getBytes().length;
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
List<String> records = new ArrayList<String>(RECORD_COUNT);
int size = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < RECORD_COUNT; i++) {
records.add(RECORD);
size += RECSIZE;
}
System.out.println(records.size() + " 'records'");
System.out.println(size / MEG + " MB");
for (int i = 0; i < ITERATIONS; i++) {
System.out.println("\nIteration " + i);
writeRaw(records);
writeBuffered(records, 8192);
writeBuffered(records, (int) MEG);
writeBuffered(records, 4 * (int) MEG);
}
}
private static void writeRaw(List<String> records) throws IOException {
File file = File.createTempFile("foo", ".txt");
try {
FileWriter writer = new FileWriter(file);
System.out.print("Writing raw... ");
write(records, writer);
} finally {
// comment this out if you want to inspect the files afterward
file.delete();
}
}
private static void writeBuffered(List<String> records, int bufSize) throws IOException {
File file = File.createTempFile("foo", ".txt");
try {
FileWriter writer = new FileWriter(file);
BufferedWriter bufferedWriter = new BufferedWriter(writer, bufSize);
System.out.print("Writing buffered (buffer size: " + bufSize + ")... ");
write(records, bufferedWriter);
} finally {
// comment this out if you want to inspect the files afterward
file.delete();
}
}
private static void write(List<String> records, Writer writer) throws IOException {
long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
for (String record: records) {
writer.write(record);
}
// writer.flush(); // close() should take care of this
writer.close();
long end = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.out.println((end - start) / 1000f + " seconds");
}
}