Readline is too slow - Anything Faster?

Question

I am reading in from a stream using a BufferedReader and InputStreamReader to create one long string that gets created from the readers. It gets up to over 100,000 lines and then throws a 500 error (call failed on the server). I am not sure what is the problem, is there anything faster than this method? It works when the lines are in the thousands but i am working with large data sets.

BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(newConnect.getInputStream()));
String inputLine;               
String xmlObject = "";
StringBuffer str = new StringBuffer();

while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null) {
    str.append(inputLine);
    str.toString();
}       
in.close();

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

to create one long string that gets created from the readers.

Are you by any chance doing this to create your "long string"?

String string;
while(...) 
 string+=whateverComesFromTheSocket;

If yes, then change it to

StringBuilder str = new StringBuilder(); //Edit:Just changed StringBuffer to StringBuilder
while(...)
 str.append(whateverComesFromTheSocket);
String string = str.toString(); 

String objects are immutable and when you do str+="something", memory is reallocated and str+"something" is copied to that newly allocated area. This is a costly operation and running it 51,000 times is an extremely bad thing to do.

StringBuffer and StringBuilder are String's mutable brothers and StringBuilder, being non-concurrent is more efficient than StringBuffer.