Disk defragmenter in Linux

[Mike McCarty]

David G. Miller (aka DaveAtFraud) wrote:
> mike.mccarty at sbcglobal.net wrote:

> Yes, but...

No, Yes PERIOD.

The point being made is to refute the idea that ext3 inherently
does not fragment files.

> [root at bend ~]# filefrag /bin/* | sort -k2 -nr | grep 'would be'
> /bin/netstat: 2 extents found, perfection would be 1 extent
> /bin/login: 2 extents found, perfection would be 1 extent
> 
> Files that are frequently updated will often have some level of 
> fragmentation.  Files that are relatively unchanged tend to be in a 
> single extent.

Again, the point was that some claim that ext3 does not and will
not fragment files which are not dynamic. I claimed that fragmentation
can occur simply due to install of software, which some claimed
will not and does not occur with ext3. I think that I have demonstrated
my point. In fact, I was quite shocked that it was as bad as that,
frankly.

> Also, the stuff in /bin will generally be small, tight, 
> command line programs.  A quick perusal of those listed in your example 
> shows a number of graphical interface programs that are anything but 
> small and don't even get me started about the size of emacs (the 
> probability of change to a program is very directly related to the size 
> of the program).

I don't use emacs except when I have to. I use MicroEmacs which
I build and maintain myself for all my platforms (MSDOS, Win95/98,
Linux, at one time Solaris and VAX/VMS).

$ ls -l /usr/bin/emacs ~/bin/em
-rwxr-x---  1 jmccarty jmccarty  505567 Oct 26  2004 /home/jmccarty/bin/em
-rwxr-xr-x  2 root     root     4408492 Feb  4  2005 /usr/bin/emacs

Mike
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