DocFetcher Pro 1.12 has just been released. This release fixes a 7z- and a tar-archive-related crash, and brings dramatic performance improvements with respect to the handling of large indexes. The performance improvements were implemented partly in response to user feedback, and partly in preparation for the upcoming DocFetcher Pro Server, which will likely have to deal with much larger data sets than the current non-server version.
For some context: DocFetcher Pro is a full rewrite of the original DocFetcher, so under the hood they are actually two completely different programs. During the rewrite, the emphasis was on correctness and long-term maintainability, while performance was less of a concern. As a result, DocFetcher Pro used to be, up until now, generally slower than DocFetcher, although this difference in performance was not noticeable until you tried to index hundreds of thousands of files. When you did index that much data, the program would exhibit various kinds of slowness: It took forever to load indexes during startup, exiting the program became slow, and checking and unchecking folders in the Search Scope pane also became slow.
In the new 1.12 release, these performance issues were addressed with a major restructuring of some performance-critical code sections, numerous smaller code optimizations here and there, and an upgrade of the bundled Java runtime from Java 8 to Java 16. In a benchmark with an index comprising about 2.8 million files, these changes led to dramatic performance improvements, notably a reduction of index loading time from 63.048 s down to 8.726 s, which is a reduction down to about 14%, or 1/6. (Note: The two loading times are averages over 10 test runs each.) Other index-related operations are now also significantly faster.
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