title: Performance issues in writing to large files?
body: <p>I have been recently involved in handling the console logs for a server and I was wondering, out of curiosity, that is there a performance issue in writing to a large file as compared to small ones.</p>
  
  <p>For instance is it a good idea to keep the log file size small instead of letting them grow bulky, but I was not able to argue much in favor of either approach. </p>
  
  <p>There might be problems in reading or searching in the file, but right now I am more interested in knowing if writing can be affected in any way.
  Looking for an expert advice.</p>
  
  <p>Edit:
  The way I thought it was that the OS only has to open a file handle and push the data to the file system. There is little correlation to the file size, since you have to keep on appending the data to the end of the file and whenever a block of data is full, OS will assign another block to the file. As I said earlier, there can be problems in reading and searching because of defragmentation of file blocks, but I could not find much difference while writing.</p>