Is there any fast looping through too many shapefiles in a folder using ArcPy?

Looping through shapefile using arcpy.ListFeatureClasses() is very slow for many shapefiles. because first thing first, it writes all in memory as a list and then read each shapefile one by one.
Is there any other way to read one by one shapefile without making them as a list and write it in the memory:

This is the slow script:

arcpy.env.workspace = shapefile_folder
fc_list = arcpy.ListFeatureClasses()
for shapefile in fc_list:
     print (fc) # doing the processing over shp here