Huh. I have never personally seen anything like that happen, and a few years ago I was doing a lot of I/O bound processing. The things that I can think of that might have been different are that I was working with lots of small files and generally had to be both reading and writing, plus this was a few years ago so there was different hardware and different operating systems.

I don't know what made the difference, but apparently it is possible for one process to max out I/O. However I still haven't personally seen it happen.

In reply to Re^7: Algorithm advice sought for seaching through GB's of text (email) files by tilly
in thread Algorithm advice sought for seaching through GB's of text (email) files by chargrill

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