Best way to read a large file into a byte array in C#?
.net, arrays, binary-data, c#
Solution
Simply replace the whole thing with:
return File.ReadAllBytes(fileName);
However, if you are concerned about the memory consumption, you should not read the whole file into memory all at once at all. You should do that in chunks.
Problem
I have a web server which will read large binary files (several megabytes) into byte arrays. The server could be reading several files at the same time (different page requests), so I am looking for the most optimized way for doing this without taxing the CPU too much. Is the code below good enough? ``` public byte[] FileToByteArray(string fileName) { byte[] buff = null; FileStream fs = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read); BinaryReader br = new BinaryReader(fs); long numBytes = new FileInfo(fileName).Length; buff = br.ReadBytes((int) numBytes); return buff; } ```