Translations:Storage and file management/9/en

Best practices

• Only use text format for files that are smaller than a few megabytes.
• As far as possible, use scratch and local storage for temporary files. For local storage you can use the temporary directory created by the job scheduler for this, named $SLURM_TMPDIR.
• If your program must search within a file, it is fastest to do it by first reading it completely before searching.
• Regularly clean up your data in the scratch and project spaces, because those filesystems are used for huge data collections.
• If you no longer use certain files but they must be retained, archive and compress them, and if possible copy them elsewhere.
• For more notes on managing many files, see Handling large collections of files, especially if you are limited by a quota on the number of files.
• Having any sort of parallel write access to a file stored on a shared filesystem like home, scratch and project is likely to create problems unless you are using a specialized tool such as MPI-IO.
• If your needs are not well served by the available storage options please contact technical support.