From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Manuel Krause Subject: Re: Silly question, defrag Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 03:58:29 +0200 Message-ID: <3CABB345.8010204@netscape.net> References: <200204030017.12595@X-Message-Flag:> <3CAABBA6.3030101@swelltech.com> <200204030740.05950@X-Message-Flag:> <20020403154906.A21821@ultraviolet.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit list-help: list-unsubscribe: list-post: List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format="flowed" To: Tracy R Reed Cc: reiserfs-list On 04/04/2002 01:49 AM, Tracy R Reed wrote: > On Wed, Apr 03, 2002 at 08:08:21AM -0800, Matthew Johnson wrote: > >>On Wednesday 03 April 2002 00:21, Joe Cooper wrote: >> >>>"Don't" >>> >>> >>Well I don't, but when newbies who are used to computing on win32 systems >>hear that they may not just accept the word don't. Actually its hard to find >>the reasons exactly why one does not defrag. >> > > It is more useful to look at why one DID defrag back in the bad ol' days > of DOS and Windows. IIRC, the FAT filesystem would scan through it's > equivalient of the free block list and start writing at the first free > block. If it wrote for a while and then there was other data in the way it > stop and go to the next free space. This way fragmentation was practically > guarenteed and it happened rapidly. Modern filesystems use much smarter > ways of laying out data on the disk so that fragmentation happens much > less often. Now you will almost certainly waste more time by defragmenting > than you would suffering whatever performance hit the little fragmentation > there is causes. I've been using Linux/Unix for 10 years and I have never > (not once!) defragged a filesystem. > > >>Perhaps I should aim this message to the kernel mailing list, so that I can >>get response from a wider array of people who like other filesystems. But its >>not kernel related. >> > > I wouldn't recommend doing that. The answer is pretty much the same > regardless of the filesystem. If it's a non-FAT fs you probably don't have > to worry about fragmentation. > > Yesss. I like defragmenters on my Win98 disks, as I really see a speedup after using them (e.g after new software installations OR a longer status quo, but the effect depends on the defragmenters configuration). You describe how/why this makes sense on FAT FS. When I backupped my ReiserFS partitions monthly I used to recreate the original FS if everything was o.k. and copy back the whole content. That's no server here, it's a standalone notebook. After that procedure I found some applications that worked faster and some that were slower than before. O.k. I may have only subjectively compared the load times of NS6 +32MB disk cache and SO5.2. They were different than before copying, but the sum didn't show any advantage. So?: I don't really need a Defragmenter on v3.6 ReiserFS in FAT scales for my usage and I really don't need to recreate and copy-back. Mmh, just wanted to add my experience, best wishes, Manuel