Re: [Mldonkey-users] Feature requst - download cache

[Lionel Bouton]

Goswin Brederlow wrote:

> 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.
>  

What FS do you use ?!?

Assuming you use Linux, this is surprising as ext2/ext3 are rather good 
at avoiding fragmentation (unless the partition gets filled, but nothing 
can prevent fragmentation in this case). If their algorithm fails, you 
could use 2 partitions like me : one partition dedicated for downloads 
and another for storage -> if fragmented, files automatically get 
defragmented when you move them from download area to storage area.

Anyway, did you run e2fsck to check the actual fragmentation ? I have 
big disk slowdowns that are P2P-related, but I believe them to be a 
performance bug in the block device management (small continuous amounts 
of writes seem to kill read performance). There is work in Linux kernel 
2.5 eliminating this problem IIRC.
I don't think this is mldonkey task to solve fs problems. For example, 
people using HFS+ under MaxOS X allocate the whole file size on file 
creation instead of waiting for data to come. MacOS X users should have 
an UFS partition (UFS does support holes in files, doesn't it ?) for 
mldonkey.

LB.