File Locator runs slow when loading list of locations from a file

Question

I have been using File Locator for some time on a xp sp3 win32 machine, using a filelist exported with fullname_only.xsl format to search for a text string, and it has worked very well. e.g.

File name:        
Containing text: Search Term
Look In:         =C:\ListOfFiles.txt

However, a while back it started being really slow. Hit the start button, and at 70 seconds the status changes to running, and at 135 seconds it actually starts searching.

The file list has around 1,800 files in it, all located on a network drive. Any idea why it's so slow?

Comments

How big is your file list? If you run a normal search through the user interface is it still slow?

Answer 1

I imagine that the slow down occurred when you moved the files from a local drive to a network drive. When FileLocator Pro loads the list it first checks that each file in the list is a valid file. This is normally very fast on a local drive but can take a little while on a network drive.

We're working on improving the performance of file lists loading.