File fragmentation

[Wayne Davison]

On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 08:15:24PM -0400, Matt McCutchen wrote:
> So rsync's configure script should check for posix_fallocate, and the
> receiver should call it just after opening each received file.

I'm wondering if this will slow down rsync.  Since the function changes
the size of the file before rsync writes out the data, does this result
in extra disk I/O, especially for large files?  We'd probably need to
test both Windows systems and Linux/unix systems separately and possibly
conditionalize the code (it it does not slow things down somewhere) or
make it a configure (command-line?) option (if someone wants to pay the
price for reduced fragmentation).

..wayne..