File IO question.

[J Poirier]

Hi All,

I'm hoping that someone might have some pointers or
examples on how to proceed with a solution to the
following problem:

A test application, which produces a trace file, is
being run for very long periods of time. Say 72 hours
or more. 

The application is often running on older PCs that
have relatively small hard drives in comparison to  
to how big the trace file can become. 

The trace files tend to accumulate as they're not 
always deleted once archived to a network database, 
and often times a machine will crash in the middle of
a
very long test due to the hard drive filling up.

There are dozens of PCs being used for the tests so
buying bigger hard drives isn't really feasible. And
I'm guessing the hard drives would fill up eventually
anyway regardless of the size of the hard drive, the
crashes just wouldn't occur quite as often.

The nice thing is that the trace files compress quite
well. 

I messed around with the mmap and file object stuff
as well as the win32 extensions thinking that I could
extract and compress the data that was being written
to
the trace file, by the application, in chuncks.

Although I was able to get it to work on a contrived
setup, it didn't work when used with the real
application.

Any hints on how to get something similar to the above
to work or recommendations on alternate solutions
would
be *greatly* appreciated.

Thanks,
Joe 
  
    


		
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