Speeding up process time while archiving files

Question

I'm new to C# and have created a basic file archiver. It works, and it does what it's suppose to do, but I think it's pretty slow. I added a simple benchmark to it in order to test the speed and ran it five times.

1. 50.7120707 seconds
2. 46.5686564 seconds
3. 50.2020197 seconds
4. 44.8384834 seconds
5. 44.5264522 seconds

So the average time for this process to run is 47.369536648 seconds. I understand that depending on the size of the files it's archiving and depending on how many files plays a big roll, so here's an image of the file sizes that I'm using as my test:

So the files really aren't to big, so I'm not sure if this is a good process time or not, it seems a little slow to me and I was wondering if there's anyway I can speed this up?

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.IO.Compression;

namespace ArchiveCreator
{
    class Archive
    {

        //These static strings are used for 
        //information handling they will be
        //color coordinated so you can see
        //what kind of information is being 
        //passed to you
        static string Success(string input)
        {
            Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.White;
            Console.WriteLine(input);
            return input;
        }

        static string Warn(string input)
        {
            Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Yellow;
            Console.WriteLine(input);
            return input;
        }

        static string Say(string input)
        {
            Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.DarkCyan;
            Console.WriteLine(input);
            return input;
        }

        static string FatalErr(string input)
        {
            Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.DarkRed;
            Console.WriteLine(input);
            return input;
        }

        static string MinorErr(string input)
        {
            Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.DarkYellow;
            Console.WriteLine(input);
            return input;
        }

        //Main method
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {

            //These variables are used to create a
            //random string that will be used as the
            //zip files name
            var chars = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwyxzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890";
            var randFileName = new char[4];
            var random = new Random();

            //Create the zip file name
            for (int i = 0; i < randFileName.Length; i++)
            {
                randFileName[i] = chars[random.Next(chars.Length)];
            }
            string finalString = new String(randFileName);

            Say("Starting file extraction..");

            string day = DateTime.Now.ToString("MM-dd-yy ");
            string userName = Environment.UserName;
            string startDir = $"c:/users/{userName}/test_folder";
            string zipDir = $"c:/users/{userName}/archive/{day}{finalString}.zip";
            string dirName = $"c:/users/{userName}/archive";

            //Check if the directory exists
            Say("Attempting to create archive directory..");
            if (Directory.Exists(dirName))
            {
                MinorErr("Directory already exists, resuming extraction process");
            }
            else
            {
                //Create it if it doesn't
                Warn($"Creating archive directory here: {dirName}");
                Directory.CreateDirectory(dirName);
                Say("Directory created, resuming process..");
            }

            try
            {
                //Attempt to extract to zip file
                Say($"Attempting to extract files into: {zipDir}");
                ZipFile.CreateFromDirectory(startDir, zipDir);
                Success($"Extracted files successfully to: {zipDir}");
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                //Catch any error that occurs during
                //the archiving stage and log the error
                //to a text file for further analysis
                var programPath = System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();
                FatalErr($"Something went wrong and the program cannot continue, exiting process with error code {e}..");
                FatalErr("Writing error to file for further analysis.");
                File.WriteAllText($"{programPath}/log/errorlog.txt", e.ToString());
            }

            Say("Press enter to exit..");
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}

Asked on Code review

Answer 1

Your code is pretty much just a wrapper for ZipFile.CreateFromDirectory, so there's not any "optimization" you can do, apart from passing different arguments to it.

You could try a different CompressionLevel - for example:

ZipFile.CreateFromDirectory(startDir, zipDir, CompressionLevel.Fastest, false);

Although you should note that you will get worse compression (larger output files).