I was trying to see if I could speed up processing huge files (in the 10's of Gigabytes) by passing various values to the readline() method of the file object.
No matter what I passed to readline() each call was slower and slower than passing no argument at all. I've used a SATA bus analyzer to see what kind of block sizes WIndows was using for the reads, and typically for non-AHCI reads, the block sizes were surpsingly small. 8 blocks were typical. It's somewhat difficult to separate I/O traffic that windows is routinely doing even when you're not reading a specific file, so putting the file on a secondary drive will eliminate most of that traffic. Can anyone explain why passing any non-negative values > 0 to readline() makes the file processing slower instead of faster? _______________________________________________ python-win32 mailing list python-win32@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-win32