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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."

3 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. that's not a good question by xintegerx · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Don't moderate up ignorance.

    That's whining... But I see his point--the only reason right now is for video files. If you want to get your video from your camcorder, it's not going to go straight to CDRW or DVD, it's going to your HARD DRIVE storage. You are going to edit it, right?
    Since you probably want to have the best quality, a single file will take a lot of space. (No I don't do this video thing, but I did my own research. Many people do have video, and for computer editing there is no reason to cap a file size.)

    Ok fine, I guess he kind of has a point in that question....

    --

    Cover your eyes and click this link!
  2. huh? by inviagrated_amnesiac · · Score: 0, Redundant

    wtf kind of sentence construction is this:

    "It's an interesting look into some of the kinds of less obvious problems that distro-compilers have to face."

    Why not:

    "It is an interesting problem that some distro-compilers have to face."

  3. Well........ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    There is not a problem with support of large files in Unix system, there is a problem with incompetent people using too large files in Unix systems. It's an old and well known problem that programmers and users tend to keep very large files for laziness and logical errors. However it's also an old and well known fact that large files are bad for performance per se due to several reasons: * fragmentation: large files increase to fracmentation of most file systems, at least of any system with uses single indexed trees/B-trees and nonlinear hashes * entropy pollution: large files increase to overall entropy on the harddisk leading to worse compression ratios for backup and maintenance * data pollution: the use of large files tempts users to store all kinds of redundant, reducible, linear and irrelevant data wasting storage space and I/O time So I don't see why admins should provide a "work-around" for the filesize limits. These limits are there for very good reasons and in my opinion they are even much to big. You should always remember that the original K&R Unix had only 12 bits for file size storage and was much faster than modern systems, in fact it did run on 2,2 MHz processors and 32 kB of RAM which wouldn't be sufficient for even a Linux of Windows XP bootloader. Think about it.