> 1) Use n sort areas for n tapes making everything purely sequential access.
Some time ago testing I did has shown, that iff the IO block size is large enough (256k) it does not really matter that much if the blocks are at random locations. I think that is still true for current model disks. So unless we parallelize, it is imho sufficient to see to it that we write (and read) large enough blocks with single calls. This also has no problem in highly concurrent scenarios, where you do not have enough spindles. Andreas ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
