2008.08.22 14:44 "Re: [Tiff] creating sparse files......", by Bob Friesenhahn

I'm stitching kind of large panoramas. This results in big

intermediate files. On my last run, which took overnight to stitch, 42 Gb of free disk space would be enough. Wrong! I thought I

got over thrity files of over 1.2Gbytes, filling up the disk.

It turns out that most of the files contain lots of zeroes. On Unix be stored effciently by not issueing a "write" with a buffer this can

full of zeroes, but by seeking over the area. The operating system as if the area was filled with zeroes. will act

This is an interesting issue. While holey files seem like a panacea, there can be some drawbacks. They are best for files which are written just once (like core files) and not so good for files which are expected to be updated in place. For files which are updated in place, the updated hole is quite likely to increase disk fragmentation since now it takes more space and the space will need to be from some other place on disk. Fragmentation behavior is quite filesystem dependent.

It is worth considering enabling filesystem compression, or using whole-file compression. Perhaps even just enabling normal TIFF compression (e.g. LZW) is sufficient to eliminate the long spans of zeros.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/