HTV Posted August 15, 2008 Report Share Posted August 15, 2008 I love utorrent dont get me wrong, but why there is the option diskio.sparse_files? Who needs it? Why its true as default?My ~8GB file is now fragmented in 16179 pieces, because it was true as default, and i cant remember did i touch the setting in 1.7.7. IMO it should be renamed to something like diskio.use_fragmentation *true With it false fragments drop to zero if there are large enough contiguous free space on the disk. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Firon Posted August 15, 2008 Report Share Posted August 15, 2008 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365564(VS.85).aspx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HTV Posted August 16, 2008 Author Report Share Posted August 16, 2008 Cool'n'all but who would need such a feature in a torrent client? Any linux distros ive came across contain very few (if any) zeros to make this useful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Firon Posted August 16, 2008 Report Share Posted August 16, 2008 It saves space while downloading, since you don't need to allocate the full file. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HTV Posted August 16, 2008 Author Report Share Posted August 16, 2008 Oh well, guess some people want to have many unfinished downloads on a filled hard drive then. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hermanm Posted April 5, 2009 Report Share Posted April 5, 2009 It seems the latest version of µTorrent has this turned off my default. I don't see a good reason to have it on by default. Even high end databases like Oracle will create blocks of contiguous disk space for better disk performance and reduce fragmentation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ultima Posted April 5, 2009 Report Share Posted April 5, 2009 (If you saw my previous reply... ignore it. I misread diskio.sparse_files as bt.compact_allocation)Sparse files shouldn't cause fragmentation unless the disk is almost full, or if there isn't enough contiguous free space on the drive for the space needed (meaning the fragmentation was already present). Physical allocation takes time -- sparse files simply reserve space in the file system without allocation, which is faster.Edit: After a bit more reading up on sparse files, I'm beginning to doubt what I've believed about sparse files. Indeed, it does appear it may cause a lot of fragmentation... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blinding Posted April 6, 2009 Report Share Posted April 6, 2009 Say you have several downloads running and one is very slow. WIth out sparse files it allocates the full disk space when the first piece is written. This can be a problem if you don't have lots of disk space.Sparse files does accelerate disk fragmentation. Space is going to be allocated for each torrent interspersed with the others assuming you have more than one torrent downloading. I just accept that the partition I use for torrents is going to be fragmented. Torrent IO is random anyway so it doesn't effect its performance. When it is done downloading I copy it elsewhere and that gives me a de-fragmented copy.Having a dedicated partition for torrents is also why I appreciated sparse files. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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