Alain escribió:
> Nicolas Alvarez nous apporta ses lumieres en ce 2007/11/13 12:41:
>>
>> Not really... Cross-platform programs that don't use any 
>> Windows-specific API manage to create sparse files here. That's why 
>> download managers that download in chunks give the option to 
>> pre-allocate: sparse files that are filled randomly get fragmented 
>> quite badly.
> And can have TONS of slack space! Just imagine a file whose records are 
> about 64 bytes each, and only having less than 0.01% of them actualy 
> used... with clusters of 4Kb. You are stuck with many clusters 
> containing only 1 record, at some random location in the cluster.
> 

Of course. The file usage on disk grows while it gets downloaded. But in 
the end, it will eventually be totally downloaded and extremely 
fragmented. So in those cases it's a good idea to pre-allocate. If you 
will have lots of "unused records" for long periods, then yes it's a 
good idea to let it use sparse files.

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