If this product was any slower ......

[JoeUSA]

Hi all, I just installed v3.3 and tried to compare 2 folders. Each folder contained 2 files and it took about 3 minutes to
display the results.
I tried 2 other folders with about 400 files in each and had to abort the operation after 10 minutes.

Is this normal for DiffMerge or is there something wrong with my installation?

Regards, Joe.

[Beth]

What are the file sizes?

Are the files you compared local?

What are your resources doing during the compare? By that I mean is your hard drive working hard using the paging file or is the CPU maxed out?

[jeffhostetler]

Folder-diffing can be sluggish, but ususally only when there
are hundreds/thousands of files.

What types of files are in the directories and how large are they?

As it is scanning the tree, it should display progress in the status
bar by showing the pathnames it is visiting. Does it give any indication
what is it doing during these long delays?

You might try turning down the "Equivalence Mode" in the Options
Dialog. Try disabling it altogether and see if that helps.

jeff

[JoeUSA]

Thanks for your replies Beth, Jeff. I have done some extensive testing using different scenarios and would like to share it with the forum. Here are the essential results:
TEST1
2 Folders with identical content - 23sec
Folder1 26 objects (jpg and flac files) 166MB
Folder2 26 objects (jpg and flac files) 166MB

2 Folders with different content - 2sec
Folder1 26 objects (jpg and flac files) 166MB
Folder2 43 objects (jpg and flac files) 320MB

TEST2
2 folders with an AVI file in each one: folder1: file1.avi 540MB folder2: file2.avi 516MB file are different - 2 sec
2 folders with an AVI file in each one: folder1: file1.avi 516 MB folder2: file2.avi 516MB files are Identical - 75 sec

As you can see, if files in the folders are different sizes it takes much longer as when the files are identical

Beth, the files are all on a local drive; size of files you can see from my post; resources are not a problem (CPU runs at about 10% and nothing else is running at the time)

Jeff, type of files you can see from my post, during the long wait there is no progress report anywhere except "Comparing files...." on the bottom of screen; disabling Equivalence Mode had no effect.

Thanks again to you for trying to help. Gideon.

[jeffhostetler]

Thanks for the info. There are several issues here.

[a] DiffMerge is intended for text files not binary files. There are some
things that just happen to work for binary files (like folder diffing), but
you won't be able to open them in a file window.

Identical files take longer to compare. I rip through them as fast as I
can and stop as soon as a difference is detected, but if they are identical, I
have to keep going until I reach the ends of both -- after all, the last byte
could be the first and only difference. For pairs that are different, I can
short-circuit that and so they are usually quicker to compare.

[c] Those are huge files. They *should* take a little while to compare. It's
not the time to do the actual compare; it's the time to get them off the disk
and read into memory. Especially with the Equivalence Mode stuff turned off.

Sorry I don't have a better answer for you,
jeff

[JoeUSA]

That expplains it Jeff, That explains it all.
As I understand diff programs, 'Folder comparison' involves comparing the content of the folders not the content of the files within the folders. In other words, the program scans the NTFS for each folder and reads the characteristics (properties) of each file in that folder such as name, dates, size etc.

That's why DiffMerge lags behind in displaying results compared to other comparison programs.

Too bad because I like the looks and feel of this one. Best Regards, Gideon.