File system fragmentation

Douglas Furlong douglas.furlong at firebox.com
Fri Oct 8 13:45:24 UTC 2004


On Fri, 2004-10-08 at 09:25 -0400, Mark Haney wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-10-08 at 09:14, Douglas Furlong wrote:
> > On Fri, 2004-10-08 at 09:08 -0400, Mark Haney wrote:
> > > What's the story with ext3 file fragmentation?  
> 
> > >From what I can tell of previous conversations, the fragmentation is
> > heavily dependant on free disk space.
> > 
> > The less space available to the kernel when storing data, the higher the
> > level of fragmentation.
> 
> > 
> > You can use filefrag to work out how fragmented a file is, which is
> > handy for large files, no so handy for lots and lots of small files.
> > 
> > May be not what you were after, but I hope it helps a bit.
> > 
> > -- 
> > Douglas Furlong
> Yeah, it's a start.  I pretty much figured it was going to be the same
> story as any other file system.  I push my systems hard.  And I have
> lots of small files which doesn't really help.
> 
> Now, can anyone tell me if a defragmenter would help for ext3?  Or not? 
> It helps a ton with NTFS, but would the same thing happen to a linux fs?
I don't know if there IS a defragmenter for linux, I know man -k doesn't
provide any new information for defrag or any thing similar.

EXT3 (essentially EXT2 for this purpose) deals with fragmentation is a
much smarter way then NTFS and FAT, but if you leave no space on your
disks there isn't THAT much it can do.

Can you not try and free up space?

-- 
Douglas Furlong
Systems Administrator
Firebox.com
T: 0870 420 4475        F: 0870 220 2178




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