The "write to text file" action seems to perform very badly in "append" mode on large files, almost as if it's reading the entire file in before writing any output. This means that any build which continually writes output to a text file will get slower and slower - the action takes milliseconds on an empty file, but 4 seconds on a 20 megabyte file. That means a build which writes say 10 times to that logfile per cycle in the build is going to be spending 95% of its time just on the logging!
Is there a faster way to write (in append mode) to a text file? Or maybe there's some workaround?
As a test, I replaced the write step by two steps: write to a text file, then spawn a dos shell to "type foo.txt >>bar.txt" - this is actually much faster, taking .5s (rather than 3-4 seconds). That seems really strange.
Slightly faster is replacing both lines with a single DOS command: echo "the text I want to write" >> bar.txt
Is there a better way?
Steve