After reading through the code in inode.c today , I am curious about the comment and the following code I will paste below. I am curious if this corner case is hit often enough for me to write a patch to improve the speed of this corner case. Furthermore , compress_file_range is the function name, in case you can't guess by the pasted code. Regards Nick 411 /* 412 * we don't want to send crud past the end of i_size through 413 * compression, that's just a waste of CPU time. So, if the 414 * end of the file is before the start of our current 415 * requested range of bytes, we bail out to the uncompressed 416 * cleanup code that can deal with all of this. 417 * 418 * It isn't really the fastest way to fix things, but this is a 419 * very uncommon corner. 420 */ 421 if (actual_end <= start) 422 goto cleanup_and_bail_uncompressed;