The Old New Thing

Why does my single-byte write take forever?

September 22, 2011 Sep 22, 2011 09/22/11

Raymond Chen

A customer found that a single-byte write was taking several seconds, even though the write was to a file on the local hard drive that was fully spun-up. Here's the pseudocode: The customer experimented with using asynchronous I/O, but it didn't help. The write still took a long time. Even using (and writing full sectors, naturally) didn...