Defrag.

[George White]

Quoting AragonX <aragonx at dcsnow.com>:

> <quote who="Dave Mitchell">
> > Linux *does* have fragmentation, just not generally enough to be a
> > problem. There are many other mechanisms going on (like dividing the disk
> > into cylinder groups) that operate to keep fragmentation manageable.
> >
> > (Again with the proviso that I'm most familiar with UFS).
> 
> It still seems to me that over a year of standard desktop usage, you would
> come up with a good amount of fragmentation.  I know this is not true for
> a server though.  I had a Redhat 8 machine that ran for over a year
> without a reboot.  When I did reboot it, it had about 5% fragmentation. 
> That's not bad for over a years worth of usage.

You can get severe fragmentation in certain extreme cases, such as log files
where multiple files are having data appended at varying times with the file
closed between additions.  XFS has xfs_fsr that is normally run periodically to
combat this sort of thing, and there are ways to preallocate the space so the
data are being appended contiguously.  On a normal desktop where the system
logs are being rotated this shouldn't be a big deal.

-- 
George N. White III
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia