File system fragmentation

[Mark Haney]

On Fri, 2004-10-08 at 09:44, James Kosin wrote:
> Mark Haney wrote:
> 
> >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?
> >  
> >
> Mark,
> 
> I've heard of some file defragmenters; but, I wouldn't recommend them 
> that I'm aware of.  Linux has more of a problem with it being a dynamic 
> OS to the point that files can change (logfiles, etc) all the time.  If 
> you try defragmenting that type of file-system, problems can arise quickly.
> 
> The easiest thing would be to log into single user mode (or into a mode 
> with very little file systems mounted...  the floppy boot would actually 
> be good here)  and mount then copy files from the old partition 
> somewhere else, then clean the old file system and copy the files back.
> 
> Google came up with these of interest:
> http://www.washington.edu/R870/examples/fragmentation
> http://www.joseph-a-nagy-jr.us/cola-faq/colafaq-3.html
> 
> The second one is more about why there is no defragmenter for Linux.
> 
> Good Luck,
> James Kosin
> ----
> PS: My PGP signing tool is in for repairs.

Those links are great.  Thanks for that.  I'm beginning to dig deeper
into the filesystem structures and that question has been nagging me for
a while.


--------------------------------------
Mark Haney
Network Administrator
InterAct Public Safety Systems
mhaney at interactsys.com
Fedora Core release 2 (Tettnang) Kernel: 2.6.8-1.521 GNU/Linux 
09:51:58 up 2:10, 2 users, load average: 9.35, 8.67, 7.80 
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