File system fragmentation

[Mark Haney]

On Fri, 2004-10-08 at 09:45, Douglas Furlong wrote:
> 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?

I have plenty of space left on the partition (15GB or so out of 30GB)
but I noticed that Evolution takes a while (a couple seconds I mean it's
not a huge difference, but I am noticing it) and began to wonder if a
defrag would help.  As I said in another post, I'm beginning to dig into
linux file systems a bit deeper and it was beginning to nag me that I
didn't know something.  I hate that. 

Thanks for all the help.


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

--------------------------------------
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 
09:53:03 up 2:11, 2 users, load average: 9.02, 8.74, 7.88 
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