This question is not a duplicate of any of these existing questions:
How can I store an object File that only exists in memory as a file inside of my storage system? - This question is not about Java's File API.
Temp file that exists only in RAM? - This is close to what I'm asking, except the OP isn't asking how to create files from memory for the purposes of sharing passing them to child-processes
I'm not asking about Win32's Memory-mapped File either - as they're essentially the opposite of what I'm after: a memory-mapped file is a file-on disk that's mapped to a process' virtual memory space - whereas what I want is a file that exists in the OS' filesystem (but not the disk's physical filesystem) like a mount-point and that file's data is mapped to an existing buffer in memory.
I.e., with Memory Mapped Files, writing/writing to a byte at a particular buffer address and offset in memory will cause the byte at the same offset from the start of the file to be modified - but the file physically exists on-disk, which isn't what I want.
To elaborate and to provide context:
I have an ASP.NET Core server-side application that receives request streams sized between 1 and 10MB on a regular basis. This program will run only on Windows / Windows Server, so using Windows-specific functionality is fine.
75% of the time my application just reads through these streams by itself and that's it.
But a minority of the time it needs to have a separate applications read the data which it starts using Process.Start and passing the file-name as a command-line argument.
It passes the data to these separate applications by saving the stream to a temporary file on-disk and passing the filename of that stream.
Unfortunately it can't write the content to the child-process's stdin because some of the those programs expect a file on-disk rather than reading from stdin.
Additionally, while the machine it's running on has lots of RAM (so keeping the streams buffered in-memory is fine) it has slow spinning-rust HDDs, which is further reason to avoid temporary files on-disk.
I'd like to avoid unnecessary buffering and copies - ideally I'd like to stream the entire 1-10MB request into a single in-memory buffer, and then expose that same buffer to other processes and use that same buffer as the backing for a temporary file.
If I were on Linux, I could use tmpfs - it isn't perfect:
To my knowledge, an existing process can't instruct the OS to take an existing region of its virtual-memory and map a file in tmpfs to that memory region, instead tmpfs still requires that the file be populated by writing (i.e. copying) all of the data to its file-descriptor - which is counter to the aim of having a zero-copy system.
Windows' built-in RAM-disk functionality is limited to providing the basis for a RAM-disk implementation via a third-party device-driver - I'm surprised that Microsoft never shipped Windows with a built-in RAM-disk GUI or API, especially given their relative simplicity.
The ImDisk program is an implementation of a RAM-disk using Microsoft's RAM-disk driver platform, but as far as I can tell while it's more like tmpfs in that it can create a file that exists only in-memory, it doesn't allow the file's data to be backed by a buffer directly accessible to a running process (or a shared-memory buffer).
CreateFileMapping with hFile = INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE "creates a file mapping object of a specified size that is backed by the system paging file instead of by a file in the file system".
From Raymond Chen's The source of much confusion: “backed by the system paging file”:
In other words, “backed by the system paging file” just means “handled like regular virtual memory.”
If the memory is freed before it ever gets paged out, then it will never get written to the system paging file.
Is it possible to write to free clusters on disk or read data from them using Windows APIs? I found Defrag API: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/desktop/FileIO/defragmenting-files
FSCTL_GET_VOLUME_BITMAP can be used to obtain allocation state of each cluster, FSCTL_MOVE_FILE can be used to move clusters around. But I couldn't find a way of reading data from free clusters or writing data to them.
Update: one of the workarounds which comes to mind is creating a small new file, writing some data to it, then relocating it to desired position and deleting the file (the data will remain in freed cluster). But that still doesn't solve reading problem.
What I'm trying to do is some sort of transparent cache, so user could still use his NTFS partition as usual and still see these clusters as free space, but I could store some data in them. Data safety is not of concern, it can be overwritten by user actions and will just be regenerated / redownloaded later when clusters become free again.
There is no easy solution in this way.
First of all, you should create own partition of the drive. It prevents from an accidental access to your data from OS or any process. Then call CreateFileA() with name of the partition. You will get raw access to the data. Please bear in mind that the function will fail for any partition accessed by OS.
You can perform the same trick with a physical drive too.
The docs
One way could be to open the volume directly via using CreateFile with the volumes UNC path as filename arguement (e.g.: \\.\C:).
You now can directly read and write to the volume.
So you maybe can achieve your desired goal with:
get the cluster size in bytes with GetDiskFreeSpace
get the map of free clusters with DeviceIoControl and FSCTL_GET_VOLUME_BITMAP
open the volume with CreateFile with its UNC path \\.\F:
(take a careful look into the documentation, especially the Remarks sections part about opening drives and volumes)
seek to the the offset of a free cluster (clusterindex * clusterByteSize) by using SetFilePointer
write/read your data with WriteFile/ReadFile on the handle, retreived by above CreateFile
(Also note that read/write access has to be sector aligned, otherwise the ReadFile/WriteFile calls fail)
Please note:
this is only meant as a starting point for your own research. This is not a bullet proof cooking receipt.
Backup your data before messing with the file system!!!
Also keep in mind that the free cluster bitmap will be outdated as soon as you get it (especially if using the system volume).
So I would strongly advise against use of such techniques in production or customer environments.
I want to do some "experimentation" to learn about the file systems starting from FAT16.
The idea is to use a C++ program to manipulate a disk at byte level and then see how it is read by Windows.
In short, format the disk to FAT16, create files, create directories, rename files, delete files, delete directories, change properties of files, see what happens if I tamper with sector number of files e.t.c. It wil all use the C++ readfile and writefile functions.
Having a "virtual disk" will make things considerably easier as no hardware will be made corrupt and the disk can be "reset" easily.
Yes, I am an electronic engineer so have to work at low level of hardware.
I want to be able to (programmatically) move (or copy and truncate) a file that is constantly in use and being written to. This would cause the file being written to would never be too big.
Is this possible? Either Windows or Linux is fine.
To be specific what I'm trying to do is log video with FFMPEG and create hour long videos.
It is possible in both Windows and Linux, but it would take cooperation between the applications involved. If the application that is writing the new data to the file is not aware of what the other application is doing, it probably would not work (well ... there is some possibility ... back to that in a moment).
In general, to get this to work, you would have to open the file shared. For example, if using the Windows API CreateFile, both applications would likely need to specify FILE_SHARE_READ and FILE_SHARE_WRITE. This would allow both (multiple) applications to read and write the file "concurrently".
Beyond sharing the file, though, it would also be necessary to coordinate the operations between the applications. You would need to use some kind of locking mechanism (either by locking some part of the file or some shared mutex/semaphore). Note that if you use file locking, you could lock some known offset in the file to act as a "semaphore" (it can even be a byte value beyond the physical end of the file). If one application were appending to the file at the same exact time that the other application were truncating it, then it would lead to unpredictable results.
Back to the comment about both applications needing to be aware of each other ... It is possible that if both applications opened the file exclusively and kept retrying the operations until they succeeded, then perform the operation, then close the file, it would essentially allow them to work without "knowledge" of each other. However, that would probably not work very well and not be very efficient.
Having said all that, you might want to consider alternatives for efficiency reasons. For example, if it were possible to have the writing application write to new files periodically, it might be more efficient than having to "move" the data constantly out of one file to another. Also, if you needed to maintain some portion of the file (e.g., move out the first 100 MB to another file and then move the second 100 MB to the beginning) that could be a fairly expensive operation as well.
logrotate would be a good option is linux, comes stock on just about any distro. I'm sure there's a similar windows service out there somewhere
Previously, I asked the question.
The problem is the demands of our file structure are very high.
For instance, we're trying to create a container with up to 4500 files and 500mb data.
The file structure of this container consists of
SQLite DB (under 1mb)
Text based xml-like file
Images inside a dynamic folder structure that make up the rest of the 4,500ish files
After the initial creation the images files are read only with the exception of deletion.
The small db is used regularly when the container is accessed.
Tar, Zip and the likes are all too slow (even with 0 compression). Slow is subjective I know, but to untar a container of this size is over 20 seconds.
Any thoughts?
As you seem to be doing arbitrary file system operations on your container (say, creation, deletion of new files in the container, overwriting existing files, appending), I think you should go for some kind of file system. Allocate a large file, then create a file system structure in it.
There are several options for the file system available: for both Berkeley UFS and Linux ext2/ext3, there are user-mode libraries available. It might also be possible that you find a FAT implementation somewhere. Make sure you understand the structure of the file system, and pick one that allows for extending - I know that ext2 is fairly easy to extend (by another block group), and FAT is difficult to extend (need to append to the FAT).
Alternatively, you can put a virtual disk format yet below the file system, allowing arbitrary remapping of blocks. Then "free" blocks of the file system don't need to appear on disk, and you can allocate the virtual disk much larger than the real container file will be.
Three things.
1) What Timothy Walters said is right on, I'll go in to more detail.
2) 4500 files and 500Mb of data is simply a lot of data and disk writes. If you're operating on the entire dataset, it's going to be slow. Just I/O truth.
3) As others have mentioned, there's no detail on the use case.
If we assume a read only, random access scenario, then what Timothy says is pretty much dead on, and implementation is straightforward.
In a nutshell, here is what you do.
You concatenate all of the files in to a single blob. While you are concatenating them, you track their filename, the file length, and the offset that the file starts within the blob. You write that information out in to a block of data, sorted by name. We'll call this the Table of Contents, or TOC block.
Next, then, you concatenate the two files together. In the simple case, you have the TOC block first, then the data block.
When you wish to get data from this format, search the TOC for the file name, grab the offset from the begining of the data block, add in the TOC block size, and read FILE_LENGTH bytes of data. Simple.
If you want to be clever, you can put the TOC at the END of the blob file. Then, append at the very end, the offset to the start of the TOC. Then you lseek to the end of the file, back up 4 or 8 bytes (depending on your number size), take THAT value and lseek even farther back to the start of your TOC. Then you're back to square one. You do this so you don't have to rebuild the archive twice at the beginning.
If you lay out your TOC in blocks (say 1K byte in size), then you can easily perform a binary search on the TOC. Simply fill each block with the File information entries, and when you run out of room, write a marker, pad with zeroes and advance to the next block. To do the binary search, you already know the size of the TOC, start in the middle, read the first file name, and go from there. Soon, you'll find the block, and then you read in the block and scan it for the file. This makes it efficient for reading without having the entire TOC in RAM. The other benefit is that the blocking requires less disk activity than a chained scheme like TAR (where you have to crawl the archive to find something).
I suggest you pad the files to block sizes as well, disks like work with regular sized blocks of data, this isn't difficult either.
Updating this without rebuilding the entire thing is difficult. If you want an updatable container system, then you may as well look in to some of the simpler file system designs, because that's what you're really looking for in that case.
As for portability, I suggest you store your binary numbers in network order, as most standard libraries have routines to handle those details for you.
Working on the assumption that you're only going to need read-only access to the files why not just merge them all together and have a second "index" file (or an index in the header) that tells you the file name, start position and length. All you need to do is seek to the start point and read the correct number of bytes. The method will vary depending on your language but it's pretty straight forward in most of them.
The hardest part then becomes creating your data file + index, and even that is pretty basic!
An ISO disk image might do the trick. It should be able to hold that many files easily, and is supported by many pieces of software on all the major operating systems.
First, thank-you for expanding your question, it helps a lot in providing better answers.
Given that you're going to need a SQLite database anyway, have you looked at the performance of putting it all into the database? My experience is based around SQL Server 2000/2005/2008 so I'm not positive of the capabilities of SQLite but I'm sure it's going to be a pretty fast option for looking up records and getting the data, while still allowing for delete and/or update options.
Usually I would not recommend to put files inside the database, but given that the total size of all images is around 500MB for 4500 images you're looking at a little over 100K per image right? If you're using a dynamic path to store the images then in a slightly more normalized database you could have a "ImagePaths" table that maps each path to an ID, then you can look for images with that PathID and load the data from the BLOB column as needed.
The XML file(s) could also be in the SQLite database, which gives you a single 'data file' for your app that can move between Windows and OSX without issue. You can simply rely on your SQLite engine to provide the performance and compatability you need.
How you optimize it depends on your usage, for example if you're frequently needing to get all images at a certain path then having a PathID (as an integer for performance) would be fast, but if you're showing all images that start with "A" and simply show the path as a property then an index on the ImageName column would be of more use.
I am a little concerned though that this sounds like premature optimization, as you really need to find a solution that works 'fast enough', abstract the mechanics of it so your application (or both apps if you have both Mac and PC versions) use a simple repository or similar and then you can change the storage/retrieval method at will without any implication to your application.
Check Solid File System - it seems to be what you need.