[tahoe-dev] Is it useful to truncate mutable files?

[Shawn Willden]

Since garbage collection is still some time distant it seems to me that there 
might be value in trying to reduce storage wasted by "deleted" files.  
Without GC, files don't actually disappear, except perhaps eventually by 
server attrition.

However, it seems to me that it is possible to reduce the waste 
by "truncating" mutable files.  By that I mean overwrite them with a 
zero-length content.  There will still be some space consumed by the truncatd 
file, but it should be less -- ideally about size * n / k bytes less.

Is there any reason this is less effective than it may appear?  Or why it 
might potentially be a bad idea?

	Shawn.