I'm trying to find a more efficient method of reading a file from a remote URL and saving it into a byte array. Here is what I currently have:
private byte[] fetchRemoteFile(String location) throws Exception {
URL url = new URL(location);
InputStream is = null;
byte[] bytes = null;
try {
is = url.openStream ();
bytes = IOUtils.toByteArray(is);
} catch (IOException e) {
//handle errors
}
finally {
if (is != null) is.close();
}
return bytes;
}
As you can see, I currently pass the URL into the method, where it uses an InputStream object to read in the bytes of the file. This method uses Apache Commons IOUtils. However, this method call tends to take a relatively long time to run. When retrieving hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of files one right after another, it gets quite slow. Is there a way I could improve this method so that it runs more efficiently? I have considered multithreading but I would like to save that as a last resort.
