Re: Another Way

Jamie Lokier (lkd@tantalophile.demon.co.uk)
Mon, 5 Jul 1999 22:32:27 +0200


Greg Lindahl wrote:
> > And there's fragmentation, if you try to keep the file roughly as large
> > as the data (no holes) without rewriting it each time.
>
> Is rewriting necessarily bad? Personally, I would rather rewrite the
> file than put compound files in the kernel. Disks are fast, and most
> of my documents are only a few megabytes in size.

First, don't confuse rewriting with in-kernel compound files.
They're separate issues.

Second, rewriting is usually very good. Nice flat files, good disk
layout. And the writing is fast because its contiguous.
Come to think of it, with sendfile() the writing would be even faster...
(cue COW filesystem rant)

I've heard that MS Word's "Fast Save" is often slower than normal save,
as well as producing stupidly large files.

Rewriting is good. In fact I can't say I've noticed any problems
reading & writing 30Mb files in Emacs. Modern computers are just plain
fast.

However you do need tons of memory and a spare few minutes to read a
30Mb .tar.gz in Emacs.

And over a network rewriting is very bad. Writing 30Mb is slow.
Actually 2Mb is slow on any network I've used. Though the fedit et
al. ideas won't work over any standard protocol anyway :-)

-- Jamie

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