MemoryMappedFile

Ever since .NET 4.0 came out I've been wanting to play with MemoryMappedFile.

MemoryMappedFile is a way to map a file to memory address, so you're able to access it just like you would a byte array (for example).

At first I've attempted to create a simple document store like library, but MemoryMappedFile has its own quirks and working around them seemed a like a task for a library.

So feel free to use this FileStore library in your own projects, mind you, this library wasn't tested beyond simple sanity tests, no unit tests or integration tests have been done and in its current form it is in no way thread safe.

There are two main classes in the library:
1. MemoryMapper which is a wrapper around MemoryMappedFile, designed to allow file growing and multiple views/streams create/cleanup.
It has CreateView/CreateStream for creating accessors and Flush which is used to free unused accessors and flush the accessors changes to disk.

2. FileStoreManager - a document store-like object which stores data on one file and the data table with guid key on another file, benchmarks are pretty good for its scope, main bottlenecks are the binary formatter and the fact that there's no index so it has to scan through the data table file, I've added a dictionary for faster access, also there's no handling for modifying or deleting objects.


So here are a few conclusions from that project:

1. CreateViewAccessor and CreateViewStream are VERY slow, use blocks as large as possible over creating views/streams for each block.
2. There's a limit to how many Views and Streams you can create, since its mapping to a contiguous memory area, it might pose a problem for the calling program to allocate memory for other things or throw an exception itself ("Not enough storage is available to process this command."). this is more likely to happen in x86 because of the short address space of 32bit applications.
3. Disposing the accessors flushes their changes to disk, if you're doing many of these, it could slow things down.
4. Resizing the file requires disposing the MemoryMappedFile and its Streams/Views, doing it is an expensive operation so you should try to minimize file resizes.

You might want to take a look at RaptorDB by Mehdi Gholam.

You can find the project here:
https://github.com/drorgl/ForBlog/tree/master/MemoryMappedFileDemo

Tags: MemoryMappedFile