Can I somehow control the file sequentiality? I want to allocate a file of 10GB. I want it to be sequential on disk and not divided between different offsets.

There are at least a couple of ways to achieve this.

1. Use a filesystem with a lot of spare space and preallocate the space (e.g. use an application specific end-of-data marker and append random data until the filesize reaches 10GB). This isn't guaranteed to result in unfragmented data.

2. Use a raw (uncooked) filesystem instead of ext4 etc. DBMSs sometimes do this for performance reasons. The tradeoff is you have to do your own caching/journalling/recovery etc if needed.

Instances where you gain much from doing this are relatively rare - I would first look elsewhere to optimise performance.

See also

Is it true that database management systems typically bypass file systems?

Can I somehow control the file sequentiality? I want to allocate a file of 10GB. I want it to be sequential on disk and not divided between different offsets.

There are at least a couple of ways to achieve this.

1. Use a filesystem with a lot of spare space and preallocate the space (e.g. use an application specific end-of-data marker and append random data until the filesize reaches 10GB). This isn't guaranteed to result in unfragmented data.

2. Use a raw (uncooked) filesystem instead of ext4 etc. DBMSs sometimes do this for performance reasons. The tradeoff is you have to do your own caching/journalling/recovery etc if needed.

Instances where you gain much from doing this are relatively rare - I would first look elsewhere to optimise performance.

See also

Is it true that database management systems typically bypass file systems?

Can I somehow control the file sequentiality? I want to allocate a file of 10GB. I want it to be sequential on disk and not divided between different offsets.

There are at least a couple of ways to achieve this.

1. Use a filesystem with a lot of spare space and preallocate the space (e.g. use an application specific end-of-data marker and append random data until the filesize reaches 10GB). This isn't guaranteed to result in unfragmented data.

2. Use a raw (uncooked) filesystem instead of ext4 etc. DBMSs sometimes do this for performance reasons. The tradeoff is you have to do your own caching/journalling/recovery etc if needed.

Instances where you gain much from doing this are relatively rare - I would first look elsewhere to optimise performance.

Can I somehow control the file sequentiality? I want to allocate a file of 10GB. I want it to be sequential on disk and not divided between different offsets.

There are at least a couple of ways to achieve this.

1. Use a filesystem with a lot of spare space and preallocate the space (e.g. use an application specific end-of-data marker and append random data until the filesize reaches 10GB). This isn't guaranteed to result in unfragmented data.

2. Use a raw (uncooked) filesystem instead of ext4 etc. DBMSs sometimes do this for performance reasons. The tradeoff is you have to do your own caching/journalling/recovery etc if needed.

Instances where you gain much from doing this are relatively rare - I would first look elsewhere to optimise performance.

See also

Is it true that database management systems typically bypass file systems?