Create new files as sparse on NT systems. (2nd try)

Vaclav Haisman V.Haisman@sh.cvut.cz
Mon Feb 17 17:57:00 GMT 2003


> Is it wise to set *all* new files to sparse? Surely if this was actually
> advantageous, Windows would do it anyway? From MSDN: "Note  It is up to the
> application to maintain sparseness by writing zeros with
> FSCTL_SET_ZERO_DATA." I.e., this will gain nothing unless the application
> knows about sparse-ness, in which case, it should explicitly specify that
> the file should be sparse. So, all this patch will do is to force Windows to
> examine more metadata for every file read. This seems *extremely
> undesirable*.
>
> Max.

As I have written in my previous emails in FreeBSD and SunOS all files are
sparse if underlying file system supports it. I doubt Windows is significantly
slower/faster in inspecting file system metadata than either of these OSes,

Vaclav Haisman



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