Re: Does \"32.1% non-contigunous\" mean severely fragmented?

[Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2007 at 10:49:03AM +0900, Tetsuo Handa wrote:

> /data/VMware: 349/19546112 files (32.1% non-contiguous), 31019203/39072080 blocks
> 
> Does non-contiguous mean fragmented?
> If so, where is ext3defrag?

Not necessarily; it just means that 32% of your files have at least
one discontinuity.  Given the ext3 layout, by definition every 128
megs there will be a discontinuity because of the metadata at the
beginning of every single block group.  You have a small number of
files on your system (349) occupying an average of 348 megabytes.  So
it's not at all surprising that the contiguous percentage is 32%.

The recent Flex BG feature that was recently pulled into 2.6.23-git14
for ext4 is desgined to avoid this issue, but a seek every 128 megs is
for most workloads not a big deal and will hopefully not cause you any
problems.

							- Ted