Newbie Info

[Lamar Owen]

On Friday 19 October 2007, Danny Mooney wrote:
> I have one computer in the household running Fedora 6 and the one I am on
> right now is a Gov XP on a Dell system that I am required to use in my
> work. My question is on the Fedora side is there a defrag program that can
> be run on Fedora in a schedule or otherwise?

Yes, there is a defragmenter for ext2 available.  Fedora by default uses ext3; 
it can be converted to ext2 and defragmented.

That being said, it is almost never necessary to defragment an ext2 or ext3 
filesystem.  I say 'almost' never, because there is one situation where 
defragmentation can become necessary, and that's when you've filled your 
filesystem over about 95% full, a situation that in the default install can 
only happen to root (or a root process), since the filesystem ordinarily has 
10% or so reserved for root.  In this singular instance, defragmenting can 
have dramatic results.

Unfortunately, the defragger only works on unmounted filesystems, and isn't 
very good.  The standard way of defragging under linux, therefore, is to copy 
everything to another filesystem, reinitialize the filesystem, and copy 
everything back.  Since usage of a defragger is so rare, a good defragger 
hasn't been written.  The existing one is, creatively enough, 
called 'defrag.'
-- 
Lamar Owen
Chief Information Officer
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu