Disk defragmenter in Linux

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Sat Dec 24 17:01:36 UTC 2005


On Sat, 2005-12-24 at 03:41, Tim wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-12-23 at 14:18 -0600, Mike McCarty wrote:
> > But writing to the files *during installation* might result in
> > fragmentation.
> 
> Initial installation, no.  Installations of applications after a system
> has been used for some time, perhaps.

This is fedora we are talking about.  If you stay up to date you've
replaced almost everything several times and the files are likely
scattered all over the disk. 

> This is another area where the Unix idea of keeping applications and
> data (user data, variable data, temporary files, etc.) partitioned away
> from brings you big benefits.

It is the disk head movement that that takes thousands of times
longer than any other computer operation.  Using separate partitions
only helps in this respect to the extent that they are on
different drives so the heads are independent.  The thing
that really saves you is the RAM cache so frequently used
items don't need to repeat the seek.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com





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