On Wed, 22 Jun 2005, Eli Billauer wrote: > guy keren wrote: > > > I don't think it's the "disk gets full". i think its "the page-cache gets > > full". try this: get a partition that is already quite full, and run the > > test on it. you will not see this problem. > > Well, you may get other results if you test it, but what I saw was that > if the partition was about to be full, I got one behaviour. Ran the same > test after deleting some gigas of data from the partition, got something > much better. Back and forth. This is how I reached the conclusion.
so it _could_ be that due to fragmentation, instead of writing a large set of data consecutively, the system wrote this large set of data in several write commands on different parts of the hard drive. > The question I find appealing in this context is when the filesystem > looks for free blocks. If it does it only by demand, this would explain > what happens. the file system contains a list of all free blocks. it looks for a free block _from this list_ when there is a need for a new free block. furthermore, it usually does not allocate a single block - rather, it tries to pre-allocate several consecutive blocks, assuming they'll soon be needed. it does this in order to avoid spreading the file all over the disk. -- guy "For world domination - press 1, or dial 0, and please hold, for the creator." -- nob o. dy -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://www.haifux.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
