Disk defragmenter in Linux

[Robert Nichols]

Hans Kristian Rosbach wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 12:17 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> 
>>On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 04:02, Hans Kristian Rosbach wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I would like to see an open-source defragmenter for ext3, if
>>>just for those worst-case scenarios. Fragmentation CAN happen,
>>>so there is a need for some.
>>
>>There's always backup/mkfs/restore.  If you aren't prepared
>>to restore you should probably take care of that before
>>worrying about efficiency.
> 
> 
> Do you know how long time it would take to put back 800GB of
> mailboxes on our mailserver from the tape backup?
> No customers in the world would allow us to actually take
> such a time-off from serving their mail.

You weren't expecting to defragment a mounted, active filesystem,
were you?  The kernel isn't going to take kindly to having a
mounted filesystem get restructured on disk.  How long would the
mail server have to be offline while you unmounted the filesystem
and defragmented it?  OK, probably less than the time to backup
and restore from tape, but it's still going to be a while.

If all you want is a way to fix some badly fragmented files,
that can be done with a shell script build around 'filefrag',
'sort', and 'sed'.

-- 
Bob Nichols         Yes, "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.