[erlang-questions] slow file I/O (was Not an Erlang fan)

[Claes Wikstrom]

Originally at Bluetail, we had some serious problems with
high performance file I/O, especially line oriented such.

I then wrote a portable (yes win32 too) linked in driver
for fast FILE I/O. It's based on an old and hacked version
of the BSD FILE* interface. It's called bfile and we've
been using it in pretty much all projects during the past 8
years. I've prepared a tarball of it at

http://yaws.hyber.org/download/bfile-1.0.tgz

Here's an (slightly edited) example shell session:

2> bfile:load_driver().
ok
4> {ok, Fd} = bfile:fopen("Makefile", "r").
{ok,{bfile,#Port<0.98>}}
5> bfile:fgets(Fd).
{line,<<10>>}
6> bfile:fgets(Fd).
{line,<<10>>}
7> bfile:fgets(Fd).
{line,<<97,108,108,58,32,10>>}
14> bfile:fread(Fd, 10000).
{ok,<<10,10,105,110,115,116,97,108,108,58,32,97,108,108,10,9,40,99,100,32,99,95,115,114,99,59,32,...>>}
15> bfile:fread(Fd, 10000).
eof

It should be equally fast as the same code in C.

Enjoy,

/klacke