When working on Illustrator project, it generate many file AIVMFile, 16Mo per file for almost 7Go of disk space, and decrease performance.

Question

Illustrator is installed on a windows Laptop, Windows Seven, Illustator 16.0.3. (last update available).
We tried to reinstall the application, but no effect.
Is this nomral that Illustrator create so many file, hundreds in a few hours, and takes 3 to 7 GO space disk ?
When I close Illustrator, all files are deleted.
When working with illustrator the computer is slow.
Thank

Answer 1

I am aware of the filesystem defragmentation, but most require offline operation and if you pre-write the disk space you need, then this is only going to be required if the file grows a lot further than you assumed.
The myths about filesystems suchas ext3 and XFS being "good" at locality and never needing de-fragmentation are unfortunately all incorrect and based upon the average user's use of text files and other relatively small files. Other filesystems on UNIX are better or worse than these two. In a server environment with a 24 hour operation, there is no down time available to perform defrag, unless it is scheduled or you use an HA solution that allows it. By far the simplest solution is to pre-write the file as fast as possible.
The effects of doing this are marked:
1) Write your file
2) defrag it;
3) Copy the key/data pairs from the file to yet another file, but this time in key sorted order (traverse the original, write the new one);
4) Defrag this new file and compress the keys etc
Then measure the performance of file traversal. Here you will reap the benefit of allowing the underlying operating system/file system to manage the reads and writes as it will almost always perform track reads/writes.
Of course if your database access is entirely random, then the benefit is reduced, but even so, the locality of allocation will reduce the disk dancing required until your data is in cache and the trickle deamon will be more efficient.
Hence, the ability to hole fill is a trivial piece of code that is filesystem agnostic and entirely backward compatibile (as if you don't make a call to do it then it will just behave as it always has). Something as simple as DB->pre_alloc(DB, sizeinMb); would do it (little point in doing this for less than megabytes).
Jim