Reading huge amounts of small files in sequence

Question

I have this problem: I have a collection of small files that are about 2000 bytes large each (they are all the exact same size) and there are about ~100.000 of em which equals about 200 megabytes of space. I need to be able to, in real time, select a range in these files. Say file 1000 to 1100 (100 files total), read them and send them over the network decently fast.

The good thing is the files will always be read in sequence, i.e. it's always going to be a range of say "from this file and a hundred more" and not "this file here, and that file over there, etc.".

Files can also be added to this collection during runtime, so it's not a fixed amount of files.

The current scheme I've come up with is this: No file is larger then 2000 bytes, so instead of having several files allocated on the disk I'm going to have one large file containing all other files at even 2048 byte intervals with the 2 first bytes of each 2048 block being the actual byte size of the file contained in the next 2046 bytes (the files range between 1800 and 1950 bytes or so in size) and then seek inside this file instead of opening a new file handle for each file I need to read.

So when I need to get file at position X i will just do X*2048, read the first two bytes and then read the bytes from (X*2048)+2 to the size contained in the first two bytes. This large 200mb file will be append only so it's safe to read even while the serialized input thread/process (haven't decided yet) appends more data to it.

This has to be doable on Windows, C is an option but I would prefer C#.

Answer 1

Do you have anything against storing these files in a database?

A simple RDBMS would drastically speed up the searching and sorting of a bunch fo 2k files