[NTLUG:Discuss] Disk I/O timings.

[merlin]

On Wed, 5 Dec 2001, Steve Baker wrote:

> Using a Ramdisk in this application is impractical since there are many tens of
> gigabytes of data involved. The files vary in size from perhaps 10Kb to a few
> megabytes - but there could easily be 40,000 of them and I don't really know
> in advance which files I'll need to read.
> 
> I read the files at a rate of at most one every few seconds - the overall
> performance isn't at issue here.

How far ahead of time do you know you're going to read a file?  Could a
spawn a parallel thread, say a second or two before hand, that did a
open/read small chunk/close type operation to load the file into cache
before your main routine needed to hit the file?

-- 
Merlin

After any salary raise, you will have less money at the end of the month 
than you did before.