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Large File Problems in Modern Unices

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-to-deal-with dept.

david-currie writes "Freshmeat is running an article that talks about the problems with the support for large files under some operating systems, and possible ways of dealing with these problems. It's an interesting look into some of the kinds of less obvious problems that distro-compilers have to face."

2 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why large files by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Real analytical work can easily produce files this large. Output for analyses of structures with more than half a million elements and several million degrees of freedom can EASILY produce output of over two gigs. Yes, these results can and should be split, but sometimes it makes sense to keep them together as a matter of convenience. Plus, there IS a small performance hit when dealing with multiple files on most of the major FEA packages.

  2. Re:Why large files by CoolVibe · · Score: 5, Interesting
    raw video can easily exceed 2 GB in size. Why raw video? Because (like others said) it's easier to edit. Then you encode to MPEG2, which will shrink the size somewhat (usually still bigger than 2 GB, ever dumped a DVD to disk?), so it'll be "small" enough to burn onto a DVD or somesuch. Oh, editing 3 hours of raw wave data also chews away at the disk size. Also, since you need to READ the data from the media to see if it looks nice, you need to have support for those big files as well. Right, now why don't we need files bigger than 2 GB again? Well?

    Oh, you're still not convinced, well see it this way: when in the future will you ever need to burn a DVD?

    Well? A typical one sided DVD-R holds around 4 GB of data (somewhat more), if you use both sides, you can get more than 8 GB of data on it. That's way bigger than 2 GB, no? Now, how big must your image be before you burn it on there? well?

    Right...