I'm aware that C, and thus Python I suppose, will cache file writes for efficiency and to avoid excessive disk activity, causing occasional problems when forgetting to flush. How exactly this works is still somewhat of a mystery to me, but a concern because of a program I'm developing:
The program performs tests on some hardware attached to a serial port and cycles every few seconds; for the reliability tests I'll do this anywhere from 10k to 100k times, logging each event. Sometimes the file gets targeted to a thumbdrive, and 100k writes likely puts significant wear on the flash, so what I've done in the past is just make my own cache of ~500 data points then go and write it all at once, but is there some way to set up the file operations so it effectively does this for me? Does the cache get written simply when an X-byte buffer fills up, and can I change X? Does it write after waiting so long? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
