On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 04:14, Joe Zeff <joe@xxxxxxx> wrote: > Basically, the system tries to find a place big enough to hold the entire > file instead of putting the first chunk into the first place it finds. Please confirm if I understood this right, as I¨m not familiar with the low-level APIs involved with file creation. Is there a way to tell the file system that you´re creating a file with total size "x" before any such data is written to it, I mean, as part of the file creation call?. I mean, it is one thing to create a file with size 0, then start appending data to it in chunk, than say "hey, I´m creating a 8-gigabytes long file, with name xyz". If the latter exists, I´m curious if there´s logic at the filesystem level to try to find a chunk of free space big enough to allocate it (to reduce fragmentation). Is that what you are saying?. I do know that for instance some bittorrent clients (Vuze -formerly azureus comes to mind) allocate the full size of the file being retrieved, then starts populating (writing) segments as those are downloaded, but I never knew if the file creation call was a single one or it actually consisted of the file creation call first, and then a write of the x gigabytes of zeroes... I can´t believe that in this day and age (i briefly looked at the win32 api and it seems there´s no api to create a fixed-size empty file) there´s no api for this, and that one has to rely on a per-app implementation (ie filing zeroes). Why am I asking this? because of this lament about the lack of a "mkfile" command in Linux as there is in Solaris http://madbodger.livejournal.com/114433.html Just curious... (I know, you will tell me "it isn´t the job of a filesystem to populate the contents of an empty file!). And maybe you´d be right. Still, I wonder if perhaps fixed-size, empty-file creation wouldn´t be much faster if it was implemented at the filesystem level). FC -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
