Slow parsing of rtf files even if they are small.

Hi,

I was looking at itextsharp for generating pdf files and found out that it also could be used for parsing/generationg rtf files.

So I have been using itextsharp to merge rtf files. The rtf files are very small and have almost no advance features, just text and color. Even thou when I am  merging rtf data using MemoryStream and the data are retrieved from a database it takes very long and the memory footprint goes up to about 400 to 450 mb.

Are anybody doing the same kind of batch merging?

I can see that if I am making one of the files empty the speed goes up so I guess it must be the parsing?

Are there anything gained if I know that I will be parsing for example 4 files that I do it in one go instead of merging them in single steps while I retrieve them from the database?

Doing:

rtfWriter.importRtfDocument( memFile1);

rtfWriter.importRtfDocument( memFile2);

rtfWriter.importRtfDocument( memFile3);

rtfWriter.importRtfDocument( memFile4);

instead of (because of the database layout):

rtfWriter.importRtfDocument( memFile1);

newRtfFile = rtfWriter.importRtfDocument( memFile2);

// Find next document

rtfWriter.importRtfDocument(newRtfFile );

newRtfFile2 =  rtfWriter.importRtfDocument( memFile3 );

// Find next document

rtfWriter.importRtfDocument(newRtfFile2 );

newRtfFile =  rtfWriter.importRtfDocument( memFile4 );

Regards,

Søren 

Merging 4-5 files where the size is 618 chars (on an average) it takes up to 5 seconds. I have to mention than it is a iterative merge because I have to check if the merged size is larger than 3K (database restrictions) before I add a new document.

Tried a new approach where I set up RtfWrite2 in one method and in another I add rtf document and I get the current rtf document. This fails because of the streams. I guess that if I continued to add to an existing rtf document I would save some time by not have to parse the merge rtf from the previous run.

The memory use just increase. The first version of the program I used RichTextBox and copy and pasted the rtf text, the program usually  got executed in about 20 minutes and used 32 mb, now we are talking about 12-14 hours! I had to drop the RichTextBox approach because sometimes it fails and return a empty rtf files. Itext solves this problem but the runtime and memory use is a big concern.

Søren