Hi Jerry
Firstly, apologies for not responding earlier, I've been away from the office for the last few weeks.
Performance monitoring is a challenging area and it can be difficult to pin down exactly what is going on in a given situation. Apart from DROID itself, much will depend on various factors such as the specification of the host machine, other processes currently running, types and sizes of files, whether they are on local or networked drives, and (in the latter case) the network speed. Changing DROID options such as the number of bytes to scan and use of hashing will also play a role. That said, with file numbers around the 5000 mark I'm not surprised that you don't see a noticeable difference in processing times when compared to a single file. As you point out, the initialisation time for the DROID profile is a major factor - this overhead will apply both in the command line profile mode and in the GUI, though not in the command line "no profile" mode. Clearly, the percentage time overhead of initialisation will decrease with as the number of files increases (other things being equal), but you may need to process several thousand files before you see a marked difference.
Testing of the latest release included regular runs over a set of around 70,000 files, mostly using the GUI version running on Windows 7. This did prove that the current release is intrinsically faster than the previous one. It is also worth noting that the best performance times were achieved on repeat runs over the same set of files on a local drive. This can be attributed to the operating system caching the files when read from disk - we did not see this behaviour when testing with network files, where the application would need to retrieve the files over the network on each repeat request.
The CSV export is also much faster in the latest version - this will be most noticeable with very large profiles consisting of hundreds of thousands of files.
Hope this helps,
Regards, Brian