In regard to: Re: Re: Tile Cache Size, Marc Lehmann said (at 1:05am on Nov...:

>On Mon, Nov 01, 1999 at 08:04:39PM -0600, Tim Mooney 
><[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Wouldn't the situation be even worse, then, if we're going through the
>> filesystem and there's "average" fragmentation?  You seem to be assuming that
>> the filesystem allocation will be contiguous (or at least close) on disk,
>> but can you really make that assumption?
>
>I donīt care for windows, if you wanted to hear that ;-> If the OS does
>not make this assumption a fact (in most cases) then all bets are off
>anyway.

I wasn't talking about windoze, and I don't care for it either.  ;-)

All filesystems have the notion of fragmentation.  Some of them *encourage*
it (UFS/BFFS, for example), and many of them *discourage* it, providing
tools to defragment, coalescing the pockets of free space into large chunks
of free space.

As far as I know, most Unix and Unix-like OSes will generally try give you
the space you're requesting as a contiguous chunk.  In the case of files like
a (e.g.) 40 Meg swap-file for the gimp, that may not be possible, even for
a filesystem that is much less than 50% full.  All it takes is "average"
fragmentation to ruin the OS' ability to give you a contiguous chunk.

This means, I think, that all bets *are* off, at least regarding the gimp's
ability to keep tiles "close" on-disk.  The bigger the swap file, the less
likely it is that the gimp will be able to do this.  That's why I asked
my original question.

Tim
-- 
Tim Mooney                              [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164

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