Re: VFAT truncate performance

[Mattias Rönnblom <hofors@lysator.liu.se>]

Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel@free.fr> writes:

> On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 15:52, Mattias Rönnblom wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > extending files by ftruncate(2) runs very slow on VFAT file
> > systems. On my USB harddisk w/ VFAT, it takes 14 seconds to extend an
> > empty file to 1 GB. On a memory stick, it takes well over 4 minutes.
> > 
> > My question is: is this problem on the conceptual level (ie there is
> > no way of extending files on FAT that doesn't involve many disk
> > operations) or is the current Linux fs driver suboptimal in this
> > respect?
> > 
> > The reason for asking is that I run Samba which service files on USB
> > devices (w/ VFAT for portability) to Windows XP clients. When copying
> > files to the Samba server, Microsoft SMB clients seem to extend the
> > file before actually starting to copy the data. This results in
> > sluggishness and timeouts when copying large files to VFAT
> > filesystems.
> 
> Is your USB stick mounted -o sync ? If that's the case, the truncate()
> and write() won't be merged so they will take twice as long. -o sync
> generally kills performance on USB sticks.
> 

No, 'async'.

Regards,
        Mattias

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