@andrestaltz your file system is built on top of a hard drive, also known as a "block device". A block is a kinda like a city block. it's a fixed sized unit, with many addresses inside of it. when the operating system wants to read some bytes from a file, the hard drive returns the entire block, most of which the OS discards. So, by designing a thing that aligns (I accept responsibility for that pun) with that means you save quite some extra work. Especially since memory also works like this (except memory blocks are called "pages")

I think the main perf difference in this case is avoiding several observables that were getting called every time you read a value from flumelog-offset.

... okay it benchmarks fast but linking it into ssb-db I'm getting some test failures... back to work.