Sub-optimal libc's read-ahead buffering behaviour

[Ryan Sommers]

Luigi Rizzo said:
> On Wed, Aug 03, 2005 at 04:55:33PM +0300, Maxim Sobolev wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have found the scenario in which our libc behaves utterly
>> suboptimally. Consider the following piece of code reads and processes
>> every other 512-bytes block in a file (error handling intentionally
>
> apparently the issue is in fseek(), you should try to track
> why fseeko() it goes to the 'dumb:' label where it simply discards the
> buffer and does the seek...
>

... other stuff omitted ...

Looks like the reason it might go into dumb is because he's using SEEK_SET
instead of SEEK_CUR and then hitting:

	if (!havepos && _ftello(fp, &curoff))
		goto dumb;

havepos only gets set if the SEEK_CUR switch is hit (oddly enough looks
like this could be considered a bug since we are relying on the fact that
havepos is zero'd when it is allocated, however, I haven't had ample time
to say conclusively).

Try using SEEK_CUR and skipping your buffer size each time.

-- 
Ryan Sommers
ryans at gamersimpact.com