I thought about that (specifically the use of the facilities in the nio
package), but I figured that the original request was targeted at
environments other than Java.  Right now, Java's direct support for
multi-core CPUs is a little lacking (ref the parser thread from last
week or so).  If it was Java, I agree, you could use the approach you
suggest.

Is the JVM really smart enough to take appropriate advantage of a
filesystem that provided the capability Sean wanted?  In the perfect
world, you would have the kernel taking care of buffering/caching the
data for you so that it would be available to multiple user-process
threads, but as far as most OS's are concerned, they just see it as
another CPU.  On a somewhat tangential note, there was an article in the
May IEEE Computer magazine about the issues facing OS's around these new
chips [1].  Based on what I remember reading, I don't think you'd really
notice the difference in Java on today's OS platforms.

ast

[1] http://csdl2.computer.org/persagen/DLAbsToc.jsp?resourcePath=/dl/mags/co/&toc=comp/mags/co/2005/05/r5toc.xml&DOI=10.1109/MC.2005.160

On Sat, 2006-04-01 at 10:28, Elliotte Harold wrote:
> What about memory mapped files? If you can treat the file as an array, 
> it's just as easy to move backwards through the array as forwards.
> 
> For network applications you might have to have three threads: one to 
> fill a buffer without parsing, one to parse from the start of the 
> buffer, one to parse from the back once the buffer is fully loaded. 
> Presumably the fill thread could outrun the other two.
-- 
Join me in Dubrovnik, Croatia on May 8-10th when I will be speaking at
InfoSeCon 2006.  For more information, see www.infosecon.org.

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