[Mldonkey-users] Feature requst - download cache

[Goswin Brederlow]

Hi,

I realy get fed up by all the fragmentation and thus slowdown of the
fs mldonkey generates. Without defragmenting now and then it reaches a
critical point where the disk speed is below the download speed.

So what could be done:

1. zero out chunks on the disk before writing real data

For example before starting a new 9 MB chunk that could be zeroed out
on the disk thus creating a hopefully continous 9MB chunk on the FS. 9
MB might be too wastefull though but what about 1MB or 64KB at a time?
That way the FS would have larger continous sections for each file and
less fragmentation.

2. cache download in a special file

Currently every byte thats downloaded is written to disk
(right?) adding new blocks to each file a block at a time in pretty
random order. That creates a lot of fragmentation. Instead of writing
the data to the real file it could be written to a cache file of say
1GB. If the cache file gets full the largest continous chunks would be
written to the real files until its only half full. Complete files,
complete chunks and complete regions (the bytes before and after the
data has been written to file already) could be flushed out
immediatly. Old data could also be flushed out to prevent stale file
to take up all the cache.

I could even think about putting the cache on a tmpfs and shut down
all drives. Of cause then chunk for upload would have to be preread
into some upload cache as well.

MfG
        Goswin