Date: Wed, 02 Aug 2006 07:54:22 -0700 From: Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> To: Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy@optushome.com.au> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, Tim Kientzle <kientzle@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: [PATCH] adding two new options to 'cp' Message-ID: <20060802145422.11A9C2948D@mail.bitblocks.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 02 Aug 2006 17:33:40 %2B1000." <20060802073340.GA713@turion.vk2pj.dyndns.org>
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> 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. Except for database tables how common is this? And for such files how important is the sequntial I/O performance? For database tables perhaps there is a size range where not making them sparse helps but for really large tables you wouldn't want to fill in the holes. I suspect that making not writing zeroes the default would actually help overall performance.
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