From: "Matthew P. Del Buono" mpdelbuono@gmail.com
I'm in the conceptual phase of a new bot but it requires a bit of processing. Unfortunately the only way this processing can be done is by writing out two small files.
However, the processing should be very fast, and after it's done the files can be trashed. For that reason, I don't think it's very logical to tax the hard drive with this processing.
Hi Matthew,
In my experience, the use of temporary files is not that bad (for example, gcc uses multiple temporary files in the course of compiling a .c file). I once did a test build of the Linux kernel on a RAM disk instead of the real disk and the difference in build time was less than 1%. The buffer cache is large enough that your program never reads them from disk anyway. The only downside to using real files instead of a RAM disk is that the system will eventually flush real files to disk for durability - but if you delete them quickly enough, this is unlikely to occur very often.
On 14/11/2010 4:21 PM, Derrick Coetzee wrote:
In my experience, the use of temporary files is not that bad (for example, gcc uses multiple temporary files in the course of compiling a .c file). I once did a test build of the Linux kernel on a RAM disk instead of the real disk and the difference in build time was less than 1%.
That's not a very good test: the kernel build uses the -pipe option of GCC and will not use temporary files, ramdisk or no. :-) The only difference you might see was the actual output files.
-- Coren / Marc
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