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Pre-allocating and zeroing files at start of torrent


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Hi. I had an idea for a new feature. Give an option to pre-allocate and zero files at the torrent's start, instead of using incremental file creation, which causes fragmentation of the file on the disk. I found something about it over on the Azureus wiki, dunno if it'd be of any help.

I'm currently trying the beta of v1.1 (build 88 ), and like it alot. It runs in ALOT less memory (2552K) than my previous client (Azureus, which normally ran at over 60 Megs!).

utorrent definatly is a good bittorrent client, and I plan on recommending it to my friends.

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  • 2 weeks later...

not sure why you would not want to pre-allocate.

this is a very good feature that lessens fragmentation, and makes sure you don't start too many files for your disk space w/o having to keep track of how much space left.

it's in v1.1.3. But is it working ok? Not sure how to check.

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  • 2 years later...

I am sorry for bringing this thread back from its grave, but is there any update on a "pre-allocate and zero" functionality?

And I mean the functionality azureus provides: Fill the whole file on the harddisk (or a network share) with zeros to avoid fragmentation.

That's the only feature that's holding me back from switching from azureus to wine+µtorrent.

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And what a resurrection it was. I don't see why you are doing this.With NTFS' ability for sparse files, it makes much more sense in a performance standpoint to apply pre-allocation with sparse files. Fragmentation increases as a disk becomes more-full however in many cases forcing contiguous files increases load on the hard drive due to continuous seeking. What's wrong with using sparse files? There has been talk of a defragment-when-done option but given the archaic nature of this thread... it could simply be deemed not a priority.

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I get the point of sparse files and most unix filesystems support sparse files. I think that it is supported through wine.

Let's assume that I disable sparse files and compact allocation and use preallocation as suggested by DreadWingKnight.

If µtorrents is preallocating let's say 1GiB in a contiguous region. As it downloads the actual data, are the chunks saved into the correct position in the file or are they saved "as they come in" - scattered throughout the file?

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