title: How to speed up ant apply over a set of files?
body: <p>I'm using the following Ant apply task to run php lint over a set of PHP source files.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;apply executable="php" failonerror="true"&gt;
      &lt;arg value="-l" /&gt;
      &lt;filelist refid="server.lib" /&gt;
      &lt;filelist refid="server.scripts" /&gt;
      &lt;fileset refid="client.lib" /&gt;
      &lt;fileset refid="shared.lib" /&gt;
  &lt;/apply&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Based on Ant's output, it takes around 30 seconds.  </p>
  
  <p>The same task performed by Make is almost instantaneous.  </p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to speed up the ant task?  </p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong></p>
  
  <p>I've tried adding spawn="true" to the apply section and it sped up dramatically.  Aside from the loss of logging, is this a good solution?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT 2</strong></p>
  
  <p>spawn=true doesn't play nice with 'failonerror=true' so spawn won't work.  </p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT 3</strong></p>
  
  <p>To answer Hakre's question in the comments, the filesets cover 66 files all together.
  I can paste the ant output if that would help.</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT 4</strong></p>
  
  <p>Would it be possible to write this same task as an exec task instead?</p>