IBM came out with an article discussing how to improve I/O performance when copying data from disk to an output stream. This looks to be very useful, especially for web services that must serve data that is relatively static. The article did not mention whether the technique could be made to work on Microsoft Windows.

New transferTo() method for copyingDisk I/O straight to Network I/O

My interest in this technique is with systems that must be updated with data from corporate servers. Pricing data, new products, inventory changes, and much more all need to be broadcast to thousands of machines across the company network. For Point of Sale (POS) machines at company stores, corporate servers have trouble handling the thousands of tiny files that must be transmitted. Eliminating the overhead of taking the data from disk to the I/O should cut in half the amount of time needed based on the performance metrics shown in IBM’s article. This could allow a machine to service double the number of clients it could serve.