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Re: Create new files as sparse on NT systems. (2nd try)
- From: Vaclav Haisman <V dot Haisman at sh dot cvut dot cz>
- To: Max Bowsher <maxb at ukf dot net>
- Cc: cygwin-patches at cygwin dot com
- Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2003 18:57:57 +0100 (CET)
- Subject: Re: Create new files as sparse on NT systems. (2nd try)
> Is it wise to set *all* new files to sparse? Surely if this was actually
> advantageous, Windows would do it anyway? From MSDN: "Note It is up to the
> application to maintain sparseness by writing zeros with
> FSCTL_SET_ZERO_DATA." I.e., this will gain nothing unless the application
> knows about sparse-ness, in which case, it should explicitly specify that
> the file should be sparse. So, all this patch will do is to force Windows to
> examine more metadata for every file read. This seems *extremely
> undesirable*.
>
> Max.
As I have written in my previous emails in FreeBSD and SunOS all files are
sparse if underlying file system supports it. I doubt Windows is significantly
slower/faster in inspecting file system metadata than either of these OSes,
Vaclav Haisman