fast writing of large amounts of data to files

[TheKedge]

Hello,
I need to write a lot of real-time data to a file. About 3kB, several hundred times a second for minutes (or hours). I need to write a list of numbers (mostly doubles but not all) as a type of header, and an array of short ints (as data). I've got a lot of number crunching going on so I'd like the fastest way of doing this?

Is there asynchronous file access in Qt? - so that I can just call some 'write' or '<<' and not wait for the func to return? Can I set some write buffer somewhere so that things only get flushed when really needed?

Is packing (#pragma..) the data in memory and mem-dumping a bad idea?

Is it better to use QDataSteam <<, or QIODevice::write ( const QByteArray & byteArray )

I don't have too much experience with files....
all help much appreciated
thanks

K

[wysota]

File access is always asynchronous - write() fills the file descriptor buffer and returns immediately. Then the system takes the responsibility of writing the data into the file (the disk needs to find the proper sector, etc.).

What I can suggest is to increase the system buffer (I think you'll have to use native calls here), implement a kind of proxy that feeds the data into application buffer that get emptied to the disk by another thread (so that you can write large amounts of data that would normally fill up the system buffer causing your application to wait until there is free space in the buffer.

And don't use Q*Stream classes - they are slower than using QFile directly.