In a way, your way works nicely. It's really easy to comprehend, which makes it appealing from a maintenance perspective. However, your solution is guaranteed to create relatively significant fragmentation if your average filesize > (binsize / 3). (Not proven, but seems about right). If you have a larger average filesize, your best bet to avoid fragmentation is to pick the largest free space that will fit. That will reduce the fragmentation you will encounter.

Another optimization is to use something like DBM::Deep to store the bins and how much space is left in them. That way, you don't have to recalculate it every time. Furthermore, dbm-deep is transactional, meaning that multiple processes don't clobber each other.

My criteria for good software:
  1. Does it work?
  2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

In reply to Re^4: Help with Space Efficency algorithim by dragonchild
in thread Help with Space Efficency algorithim by jkhunt

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