To fight fragmentation it is best to tell the OS to allocate a continuous chunk of space for your file. With specialized APIs, the OS can do this without performing any IO (not counting metadata). I am adding support for this as part of bug 592520.  Linux features posix_fadvise for preallocating files. Windows’s SetEndOfFile achieves the same result. Supposedly OSX can do this via fcntl(F_PREALLOCATE), but does it?

I’ve experimented with posix_fadvise/SetEndOfFile and determined that they both change the file size and do their best to avoid fragmentation. Unfortunately I do not see any effect of fcntl(F_PREALLOCATE) on OS X 10.6 (the return code is successful). The file size does not change and if I then write to the file, it seems to fragment just as much as before. Can a Mac expert demonstrate that fcntl(F_PREALLOCATE) makes any difference at all?

Update: Thanks a lot for the useful feedback, it was extremely helpful in producing this patch. It appears that the posix_fallocate equivalent is to the fnctl followed by a truncate() call (which actually forces data to be written to the file).