Vaclav Haisman wrote: >> Could you do some tests, so we have more than conjecture to go on? >> >> What programs actually *benefit* from sparseness? > > My primary motivation to do this is that I use P2P sharing program > called BitTorrent. This program is written in Python and I run it in > Cygwin. This program first creates whole file that I want to download > by writing very few bytes with long distances between them and then > fills it as it downloads chunks of the file from various other peers. > The creation of this file takes from tens of seconds to few minutes > without this patch, depending on size of the file. But with this > patch it takes about two seconds to create this almost empty file. > The files I usually download are movies. I don't experience any extra > slowness while playing such created files.
Well, why not have BitTorrent set the file as sparse? Why should Cygwin do this for *all* files? - if it was universally advantageous, I would imagine it would be on by default in Windows. Max.