Allocate disc space

[geekperson]

Ok, here is the problem, I want to try running functions on large files to see how long the will take to run, but I don't want to make huge text files and run the functions against them. Is there a way to allocate memory, let's say 100mb and then run a function on those bytes/bits? (the content doesn't matter)

[DataMiser]

It would not be an acurate test, If you need to check the speed of processing large files then you should work with large files. Memory is much faster that file i/o

Surely you have some large files already on the system

[BioPhysEngr]

DataMiser is correct. However, should you still want to pursue this, you may find MemoryStream (link) to be useful. In short, it is a Stream (like a filestream) that is backed by a byte array.

Hope that helps!

[boudino]

With the respect to DataMiser's point, I've used following unmanaged methods to (de)allocate large amout of memory

 IntPtr p = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(size);
 Marshal.FreeHGlobal(p);