How often should saving to disk occur in an automatically saving text editor?
- by lelandmiller
I am developing a simple text editor and would like the application to save the text automatically. In other words, the user would never have to press a save button.
I have seen other applications that do this, and was wondering how often is it safe to write files to disk? From a user experience standpoint, it seems that the more frequently this happens the better, but I am worried about performance and possible disk wear (especially on writes to SSDs). It seems like the operating system disk caching might help avoid these problems, but I also don't know if its safe to rely on that for an application like this.
I was planning on writing the whole document to disk at each save, but this just seems terribly inefficient if the OS ends up writing it to disk to frequently, but relying on program unload may lose data in the case of a crash.
Does anyone have any experience dealing with this that might be able to help?
