Comment 2 for bug 165213

On Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 01:08:10AM -0000, Gianni Tedesco wrote:
> I also noticed problems with ghex and large files. Is it a 32 or 64 bit
> CPU that you're using?

 64bit: AMD64 Ubuntu Gutsy.

> I'm not sure ghex is designed to handle that big
> a file at all. Besides it ought to save to a temporary file and rename
> it over the original, just to be safe and avoid chomping your data
> anyway.

 Yeah, as long as it always re-writes the whole file anyway, that's a good
plan. It's not really useable on block devices of any significant size
anyway, with its current design.

> As for the performance with big files, mmap is the way to go. The
> attached patch demonstrates this. I tried it out on some fairly modestly
> sized files (600MB sort of ballpark) and the results were predictably
> spectacular. This patch is a bug-ridden hack but it might work for your
> case.
>
> I started work on doing all this portably with glib. There's a way to do
> it without changing the UI behaviour but it's not a trivial one-nighter
> and my school homework + other things got in the way for now so...

 I don't really have time to spend on this either. :(

--
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cor , des.ca)

"The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours!
 Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack
 my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BC