How to obtain good concurrent read performance from disk

Question

I\'d like to ask a question then follow it up with my own answer, but also see what answers other people have.

We have two large files which we\'d like to read from two

Answer 1

Paul - saw the update. Very interesting.

It would be interesting to try it on Vista or Win2008, as people seem to be reporting some considerable I/O improvements on these in some circumstances.

My only suggestion about a different API would be to try memory mapping the files - have you tried that? Unfortunately at 2GB per file, you're not going to be able to map multiple whole files on a 32-bit machine, which means this isn't quite as trivial as it might be.