I think that a better use of the file system would yield much more performance, since JVM IO is pretty much optimized for file access anyway (and uses OS-level caching).
thoughts?
I've been looking at the java.nio stuff, especially in the area of memory mapping some files :-P I can tell you that it's FAST, and basically does the trick. See a file as a big array in ram, well, but actually it's only a "fake" array mapped really on the disk, and cached by kernel...
I've been thinking of that myself -- do I remember correctly that we've tossed around the idea of making 2.2 jdk1.4 only??
That would be so cool... Now that even IBM has a 1.4 JVM for most platform (including Linux), well, I don't see why not! :-)
Pier
