Re: Ext3 vs NTFS performance

Anton Altaparmakov
2007-05-04T14:50:26Z

On 4 May 2007, at 10:46, Christoph Hellwig wrote:

> On Fri, May 04, 2007 at 09:12:31AM +0100, Anton Altaparmakov wrote:
>> Nothing to do with win32 functions. Windows does NOT create sparse
>> files therefore it never can have an issue like ext3 does in this
>> scenario. Windows will cause nice allocations to happen because of
>> this and the 1-byte writes are perfectly sensible in this regard.
>> (Although a little odd as Windows has a proper API for doing
>> preallocation so I don't get why it is not using that instead...)
>
> Which means the right place to fix this is samba.

Absolutely, agreed.

> Samba just need
> to intersept lseek and pread/pwrite to never allocate sparse files
> but do the right thing instead. Now what the right thing would
> probably
> be a preallocate instead of writing zeroes, and we need to provide the
> infrastructure for them to do it, which is in progress currently.
> (And in fact samba already does the right thing for XFS if you use
> the prealloc samba vfs module, which AFAIK is not the default)

Best regards,

Anton
--
Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @)
Unix Support, Computing Service, University of Cambridge, CB2 3QH, UK
Linux NTFS maintainer, http://www.linux-ntfs.org/