From owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG  Wed Aug  2 10:51:05 2006
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Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2006 20:50:57 +1000 (EST)
From: Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org>
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Subject: Re: [PATCH] adding two new options to 'cp'
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On Wed, 2 Aug 2006, Peter Jeremy wrote:

> As a general comment (not addressed to Tim):  There _is_ a downside to 
> sparsifying files.  If you take a sparse file and start filling in the 
> holes, the net result will be very badly fragmented and hence have very 
> poor sequential I/O performance.  If you're never going to update a file 
> then making it sparse makes sense, if you will be updating it, you will 
> get better performance by making it non-sparse.

Aha!  Thanks for that, Peter.

-- Dave, wondering why anyone would *not* want sparse files...