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Troy and I were rehashing some of yesterdays long blog. It seemed prudent for a redux.

First and foremost. Halfway through writing this blog, I discovered an error. Anyone surprised? But I learn more and more. The C flush() function is analagous to the VisualWorks flush method. The man page points out: "Note that fflush() only flushes the user space buffers provided by the C library. To ensure that the data is physically stored on disk the kernel buffers must be flushed too, e.g. with sync(2) or fsync(2)." Like the man page, you have to scroll to the bottom of the MSDN Write() reference for C#'s StreamWriter and follow a link or two to discover that it is the same. I can't actually find a method that allows you to force a sync, but you can set the StreamWriter to "AutoSync" or something like that. IMO, any "log" should "commit" each entry to disk. So both of Troy's versions (Smalltalk and C#) were, uh, flawed (sorry Troy, I gotta pass some of the buck for my bad journalism here, I'm running low on my daily allotment of hubris).

From a "logging" perspective, this whole premise is a waste of time. If you've got an application that needs to generate 85 MB of superfluous and synced logging in under 15 seconds, you have much larger issues. Number one, it's not gonna happen. Under any language. Number two, at that rate, you're gonna fill a disk pretty fast.

So how does VW IO stack up now? The workspace script:

fd := IOAccessor defaultForFiles openFileWriteOnly: 'log'.
bytes := ByteArray new: 8192.
(Time millisecondsToRun: [10000 timesRepeat: [fd writeFrom: bytes startingAt: 1 forSure: 8192]]) out.
fd close 

The final conclusion is that like any software I write, you should probably wait for the .1 or .2 release of any of my blogs. :(

Blog categories are like code comments. They lie.